"I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague."

Fernando Pessoa Literature See all quotes by Fernando Pessoa →

React to this quote

More by Fernando Pessoa

“We’ve been devastated by the severest and deadliest drought in history – that of our profound awareness of the futility of all effort and the vanity of all plans.”

“Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.”

“I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.”

“Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.”

“And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.”

“Wasting time has an esthetics to it.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else."

— Natalie Goldberg

Literature1948

#writing

"Never again war! Never again hatred and intolerance!"

— Pope John Paul II

Religion1920–2005

#war

"When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I'm not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvasses a…"

— Pablo Picasso

Art1881–1973

#life

"Here... is the Schrödinger equation ... and what it's actually saying is that the state of the world, that's this Greek letter Ψ there with the bracket around it... It's saying that the rate of change…"

— Max Tegmark

Science1967

#science