Fernando Pessoa Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above. Poems of Fernando Pessoa

2. To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet. The Book of Disquiet

3. المرآة تعكس بدقة متناهية دون أن تخطئ ابداَ . لأنها وبكل بساطة لا تفكر

4. A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny. The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

5. Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!... Poems of Fernando Pessoa

6. Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,Deliberately at the same time...No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!I can’t even light the next cigarette... If it’s an action,It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life. Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems

7. Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen. The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

8. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness. The Book of Disquiet

9. If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. Poems of Fernando Pessoa

10. Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice Poems of Fernando Pessoa

11. Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone! Poems of Fernando Pessoa

12. My past is everything I failed to be. The Book of Disquiet

13. O multicoloured hours!… Moments like flowers, minutes like trees, O time frozen in space, time dead from space and covered by flowers, by the fragrance of flowers, and by the fragrance of the names of flowers!… The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

14. Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth. The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

15. Sitting at the tables of cafés in the cities I visited, I found myself thinking that everything tasted to me of dreams, of emptiness. I sometimes found myself wondering if I was still sitting at the table of out old house, motionless and dazzled by dreams! I cannot promise you that this is not what is happening, that I am not still there now, that all this, including this conversation with you, is false and imaginary. Who are you, by the way? The absurd thing is that you don’t know either... The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

16. 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.

17. The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

18. There is no happiness without knowledge, but the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know one is happy is to know that one is passing through happiness and, therefore, will soon be obliged to leave it behind. In happiness as in everything, knowledge kills. Not to know, however, is not to exist.

19. Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

20. To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above. Poems of Fernando Pessoa

21. We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.