Fernando Pessoa

Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher (1888-1935)

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

To be great,be whole;
ExcludeNothing,ExaggerateNothing that is not you
Be whole in everything
Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Every gesture is a revolutionary act.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

My life: a tragedy booed off the stage by the gods after only the first act.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

I am the interval between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me, the abstract, carnal halfway.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Everything we do, in art and life, is the imperfect copy of what we intended.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Solitude torments me; company oppresses me.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Only the imprisoned, with the fascination of someone watching ants, would pay such attention to one shifting ray of sunlight.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Life chills me. My existence is all damp caves and dark catacombs.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

The label that best defines my spirit today is that of creator of indifferences.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Blessed be moments, millimetres and, even humbler than these, the shadows of all tiny things!

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

I am an endlessly sensitive photographic plate.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

A breath of music or of a dream, anything that might make me almost feel, anything that might make me stop thinking.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

A nostalgic longing for the fountains that play in other people's gardens...A feeling of tenderness for what never happened...

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

How wearisome it is to be loved, to be truly loved! How wearisome to be the object of someone else's bundle of emotions!

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Learn to take pleasure not in what something actually is, but in the ideas and dreams it provokes.

[Fernando Pessoa @tiny_pessoa]

Be pure, not in order to be noble or strong, but to be oneself. If you give love, you lose love.