Tag: fernando pessoa

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

– Fernando Pessoa –

Ph : Barbara Cole

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows… I’ve written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

– Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming…

to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us …

In dreams I have achieved everything.

– Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

What’s in me is mostly tired –

Not this or that,

Not at all or anything.

Tiredness like that, himself,

Tired.

The subtlety of useless sensations,

The violent passions for nothing,

The intense love for someone who’s supposed to,

All these things –

Those and what’s missing in them forever -;

All of this is exhausting.

This tiredness,

Tired.

There is no doubt who love the infinite,

There is no doubt who desires the impossible,

There are definitely those who do not want anything.

Three types of idealistic, and I none of them:

Because I love infinitely the finite,

Because I wish impossibly possible,

Because I want everything, or a little more, if it can be,

Or even if it can’t be…

And the result?

For them life lived or dreamed,

For them the dream dreamed or lived,

For them the average between everything and nothing, that is, this…

For me only one big, one deep,

And, oh with what happiness infecundo, tiredness,

A supremíssimo weariness,

Íssimo, íssimo, íssimo,

Tired…

9-10-1934

Poetry of álvaro de Campos. Fernando Pessoa. Lisbon: Attica, 1944 (Imp. 1993)

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

– Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while …

I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.-

– Fernando Pessoa Ferreira –

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.

– Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

Ph : Marcel Lefrancq

I do not know how many souls I have.
Every moment I changed.
Continuously strange to me.
I’ve never seen or thought.
From being so, I have only soul.
Those who have souls are not calm.
Those who see are only what they see.
Who feels is not who it is.

Attentive to what I am and I see,
I turn to them and not me.
Every my dream or desire,
It is from what is born, not mine.
I am my own landscape,
I watch my passage,
Diverse, mobile and alone.
I do not know where I am.

Therefore, I am reading others,
like pages, my being.
What he does not foresee,
What he has forgotten.
I notice on the sidelines what I read
What I thought I felt.
Do I re-read and say, “Did I?”
God knows, because he wrote it.

– Fernando Pessoa –