Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Soul

Quotes about: Soul

• My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Symphony, Soul, Sound

• 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

  Hope, Hurt, Regret

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

• I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Numbness, Boredom, Soul

  Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.172, Penguin UK

• 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.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Children, Distance

  "The Book of Disquiet".

• Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Writing, Voice

  Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.321, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• Everything is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Soul, Worthwhile, Ifs

• Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things

  Fernando Pessoa

  Fall, Night, Essence

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, "A Factless Autobiography", number 3, translation by Richard Zenith, 1982.

• We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Hurt, Writing, Soul

• The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Emotional, Soul, World

• Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Stars, Communication, Philosophical

  "Book of Disquietude".

• That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Wall, Mirrors, Diversity

• Nature is the difference between the soul and God.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Differences, Soul

  Fernando Pessoa, Iain Watson (1991). “The book of disquiet: a selection”, Quartet Encounters

• I am the escaped one, After I was born They locked me up inside me But I left. My soul seeks me, Through hills and valley, I hope my soul Never finds me.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Soul, Valleys, Hills

• After the rains departed the skies and settled on earth - clear skies; moist brilliant earth - greater clarity returned to life alone with the blue above and made the world below rejoice with the freshness of the recent rain. It left heaven in our souls and a freshness in our hearts.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Rain, Heart, Blue

• My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Soul, Shadow, Gone

  Fernando Pessoa (1974). “Selected Poems”

• In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Soul, Different, Purpose

• 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. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Thinking, Journey, What Matters

• But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hand pick flowers And the soul takes no notice.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Flower, Sadness, Thinking

  Fernando Pessoa, Edwin Honig, Susan M. Brown (1998). “Poems of Fernando Pessoa”, p.9, City Lights Books

• My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Taken

• And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Thinking, Soul, Feels

• I walk along a street and see in the faces of the passersby not the expression they really have but the expression they would have for me if they knew about my life and how I am, if I carried, transparent in my gestures and my face, the ridiculous, timid abnormality of my soul.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Expression, Soul, Gestures

• I never had anyone I could call “Master”. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the right path. In the depths of my dreams no Apollo or Athena appeared to me to enlighten my soul

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Soul, Depth

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.50, Profile Books

• Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Thinking, Cities, Soul

  "The Book of Disquiet".

• I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Flower, Soul, Ornaments

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.134, Profile Books

• If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Grief, Sadness, Mean

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