"Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination."

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

"Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unn…"

— Derrick Jensen

Social Activism1956–2017

#art

"Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challen…"

— Derrick Jensen

Social Activism1956–2017

#religion

"Moved by a generous eagerness to turn men's attention to the power which dwelt in circumstances, Mr. Owen devised the instructive phrase, that "man's character was formed for him and not by him." He u…"

— George Holyoake

Journalism1817–1906

#time

"In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides…"

— Pope Gregory I

Religion

#life