I write attentively, bent over the book in which with my entries I jot down the useless history of an obscure company; and at the same time, with the same attention, my thoughts follow the progress of a nonexistent ship as it sails for nonexistent, oriental lands.
-Fernando Pessoa
I've discovered that I always think about and pay attention to two things at the same time. All of us must be that way to some extent. Some impressions are so vague that only afterward, because we remember them, do we know that we had them; of those impressions, I think, are formed a part - the internal part, perhaps - of everyone's double attention. / it happens with me that the two realities I attend to stand out equally. My originality consists in that. I that, perhaps, consists my tragedy and its comedy.
-Fernando Pessoa
I have always rejected the idea of being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I am not, humanly, decently, and naturally unknown.
-Fernando Pessoa
I don't know if this just happens to me, if it happens to all those civilization causes to be born a second time. But it seems that for me, or for those who feel as I do, the artificial has become the natural, and it is not the natural that is strange. I'm not expressing myself well: the artificial did not become natural; the natural came to be different.
-Fernando Pessoa
Nevertheless, we must never take the artificial for the natural. It is through harmonizing the natural and the artificial that we find what is natural in the superior human soul.
-Fernando Pessoa
Nevertheless, we must never take the artificial for the natural. It is through harmonizing the natural and the artificial that we find what is natural in the superior human soul.
-Fernando Pessoa
Artificiality is the way to enjoy naturalness. - Fernando Pessoa
Modesty has a value above all in relation to sensuality, as does an obstacle in relation to energy. - Fernando Pessoa
Without bitterness, I enjoy the absurd awareness of not being anything, the foretaste of death, of extinction. - Fernando Pessoa
1- Seeing is having seen.
2- the thing we suppose is alive in the supposition.
2- the thing we suppose is alive in the supposition.
-Fernando Pessoa
Far and away the most crucial aspects of Pessoa's work that I wholeheartedly agree with....
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Living, it seems to me, is a metaphysical error of matter, a mistake of inaction.
I look attentively at the traces of absorption and distraction that are erased in it.
No problem has a solution.
We use our feelings indiscriminately to resolve the problems of our intelligence, and we do it because we are tired of thinking or because we are too timid to draw conclusions, out of an absurd necessity to find support, or out of a gregarious impulse to return to others and to life.
Since we can never know all elements in a problem, we can never solve it. We lack the data necessary to attain the truth as well as the intellectual processes that would exhaust the interpretation of those data.
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Living, it seems to me, is a metaphysical error of matter, a mistake of inaction.
I look attentively at the traces of absorption and distraction that are erased in it.
No problem has a solution.
We use our feelings indiscriminately to resolve the problems of our intelligence, and we do it because we are tired of thinking or because we are too timid to draw conclusions, out of an absurd necessity to find support, or out of a gregarious impulse to return to others and to life.
Since we can never know all elements in a problem, we can never solve it. We lack the data necessary to attain the truth as well as the intellectual processes that would exhaust the interpretation of those data.
- Fernando Pessoa
Renewed, fluid, uncertain, the rain resounded. The moments were slow in coming in the face of noise. The solitude of my soul stretched out, dragged itself, invaded what I was feeling, what I was desiring, what I was going to dream. The vague objects, participants in the shadow of my insomnia, went on to take place and to suffer pain in my desolation.
-Fernando Pessoa
What if the day and happiness were never to come! What if hope could at least not have the disillusion of attainment.
-Fernando Pessoa
My soul was the same as ever, among the bedclothes as if among people, painfully conscious of the world. The day, like happiness, a was slow in coming - at that moment it seemed postponed indefinitely.
-Fernando Pessoa
Another life, that of the city passing night. Another soul, that of someone staring at the night. I continue, uncertain and allegorical, sentient but unreal. I am like a story someone might have told, and, because it was so well told, goes (but not too far) carnally through this novelistic world.
-Fernando Pessoa
A rule of life that all of us can and should learn. We can learn serious things in life from charlatans and theives; the stupid can teach us philosophy; some lessons about firmness and law come by chance while others deal with chance. Everything is in everything.
-Fernando Pessoa
How many times, how many, as now, has it pained me to feel what I am feeling - to feel something like anguish only because that's what feeling is, the disquiet of being here, the nostalgia for something else, something unknown, the sunset of all emotions, the yellowing of myself fading into a shy sadness in my external awareness of myself.
-Fernando Pessoa
I feel and I forget. A nostalgia common to all people, because all things invade me like an opium in the cold air. I experience an intimate, false ecstasy of seeing.
-Fernando Pessoa
I always live in the present. The future - I don't know it. The past - I no longer have it. The one weighs on me like the possibility of everything, the other weighs on me like the reality of nothingness. I have neither hope nor nostalgia. Knowing what my life has been until today - so many times and in so many ways the opposite of what I would have wanted it to be - what can I assume about my life in the future except that it will be what I do not assume, what I do not want, that happens to me outwardly, even through my will? I don't even have anything in my past that I remember with the useless desire to repeat it. I was never anything but a vestige and a simulacrum of myself. My past is everything I never managed to be. I am not even nostalgic for the sensations I had in lost moments: what we feel is what the moment demanded; when the moment passes, a page is turned and the story continues but not the text.
-Fernando Pessoa
To achieve, during the mystic state, only what that state has which is pleasurable, without what it has that is demanding; to be the ecstatic the mystic or without initiation: to spend the course of days meditating on a paradise one does not believe in - that all seems fine to the soul, providing the soul knows what not knowing is.
-Fernando Pessoa
Everything Iooked for life, I stopped seeking. I'm like someone who distractedly searches for something, and who forgets what it was, during the dream he has while searching.
-Fernando Pessoa
During certain very clear moments of meditation, like these in which, at the beginning of the afternoon, I wander observingly through the streets, every person brings me a message, every house shows me something new, every sign has an announcement for me.
-Fernando Pessoa
My silent stroll is a constant conversation, and all of us, men, houses, stones, signs, and sky, are a great multitude of friends rubbing verbal elbows in the grand procession of Destiny.
-Fernando Pessoa
In the vague shadows of fading light just before late afternoon turns into early night, I enjoy wandering around without thinking about what the city is turning into, and I walk along as though there were no hope for anything. What is pleasant, more to the imagination than to the senses, is the dispersed sadness that accompanies me. I wander, and within me I leaf through, without reading it, a boom interspersed with rapid images, of which I indolently develop an idea that is never completely formed.
There are people who read as quickly as they look at the words and who finish reading without having seen everything.
There are people who read as quickly as they look at the words and who finish reading without having seen everything.
-Fernando Pessoa
I can't discriminate between tedium and something else.
-Fernando Pessoa
In the aerial viscosity of the abstract street, there is only one exterior thread of feeling, like drool of an idiot Destiny dripping on my soul's consciousness.
-Fernando Pessoa
The reification I experience or least in my awareness of a personal nature, is that I have no power. Alternately, I do give my power away freely (experience) that I feel it in some ways. I do not give into power (awareness) that resembles authority. I function as I see fit.
- Marco Almeida
"Evening falls lightly, the end of the certain day, when those who believe and who wander engage in their usual work, and they have, in their own pain, the happiness of unconscious."
-Fernando Pessoa
For a long time, I haven't existed. I am extremely calm. No one can distinguish me from who I am. I felt myself breathe just now as if I'd done something new, something late in coming to me. I begin to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and again take the course of my existence. I don't know if by doing so I will be happier or sadder. I know nothing.
At least I can feel sad and be aware that in this sadness of mine - seen with hearing... For a long time, I haven't been myself.
-Fernando Pessoa
Decadence is the total loss of unconscious life because unconsciousness is the basis of life. If the heart could think it would stop.
-Fernando Pessoa
We do not have, it is true, a concept of value to apply to the work we produce.
-Fernando Pessoa
I'm always horrified whenever I finish anything. Horrified and desolate. My instinct for perfection should inhibit me from ever finishing anything; it should in fact inhibit me from ever beginning. But I become distracted and do things. My accomplishments are not the product of my applied will but a giving away of my will. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have soul enough to stop things. This book is my cowardice.
-Fernando Pessoa
What disquiet if I feel, what discomfort if I think, what futility if I love!
I interrogate myself and do not recognize myself. I never did anything useful and I will never do anything justifiable.
I spent the part of life that I didn't lose in confusedly interpreting anything, making verses in prose of the untransmittable sensations by means of which I make the unknown universe mine. I am full of myself, objectively and subjectively.
-Fernando Pessoa
Should I someday by chance have a solidly secure life and can freely write and publish, I know I'll be nostalgic for this uncertain life in which I barely write and do not publish.
I'll be nostalgic, not only because this frustrating life has passed away and is life I will never have ever again, but because it is a particular pleasure, and when it passes into another life, even if that new life is better, that particular pleasure is less joyous, that special quality is less good, it ceases to exist, and there is an absence.
I am nostalgic about the hypothesis of being able one day to be nostalgic, even if that nostalgia is absurd.
I'm almost asking whatever gods there are to keep me here, as if I were in a coffer, defending me from the bitterness and also the happiness of life.
-Fernando Pessoa
If it weren't for constant dreaming, living in a perpetual alienation, I would be happily able to call myself a realist, that is, an individual for whom the external world is an independent / nation /. But I prefer not to call myself anything, to be who I am with a / certain / obscurity and to have with myself the malice of not knowing how to forsee myself.
I have a kind of obligation to dream forever; therefore, since I am nothing more and don't want to be more than a spectator of myself, I have to have the best spectacle I can.
So I make myself out of gold and silks, in false halls, false stage, ancient scenery, a dream created amid plays of soft light and invisible music.
-Fernando Pessoa
In my ignoble and profound soul, I register, day by day, the impressions that form the external substance of my self-awareness.
-Fernando Pessoa
I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my internal promises. I always enjoyed, as if I were another, a stranger, the defeats of my divagations, accidental witness to what I thought I was.
I never gave credence to that I which I believed.
I filled my hands with sand, I cleaned it gold, and emptied my hands of all of it. The sentence was my only truth. With the sentence said, everything was done; the rest was the sand as it alway was.
-Fernando Pessoa
I envy everyone because they aren't me. Since of all impossible things, this one seemed the most impossible, it was the one that constituted my daily anxiety, the despair of all my sad hours.
-Fernando Pessoa
I became like a character in a book, a read life. What I feel is (without my wanting it so) felt so that it can be written. What I think, therefore, I think in words mixed with images that undo my thoughts, which are open in rhythms that are just something else.
I've put myself back together so many times that I've destroyed myself. I've thought myself so many times that by now I am my thoughts and not myself.
I plumbed my depths and dropped the plumb; I live wondering if I'm deep or not, without another plumb now that my eyes show me, from white to black in the mirror of the high well, my own face that contemplates me contemplating it.
-Fernando Pessoa
1 comment:
Pessoa uses the unconscious to enhance his ability at a fundamental level through reasoning and abject thinking.
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