"Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools."

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

"Universities can try, with a little imagination, a little nerve, and a little more money, to provide a humane working and living environment for every human being they employ and every human family in…"

— Michael Bérubé

Literature1961

#family

"For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it w…"

— James Anthony Froude

Religion1818–1894

#family

"My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk . Even the dumb, uninteresting ones who were there to provide “balance” looked forward to their marriag…"

— Susanna Kaysen

Literature1948

#family

"None are so easily taken in as the "knowing ones." The knowing one is generally an egregious ninny. The man who loses his last shilling at Doncaster, is no other than he who was sure of winning; who c…"

— Samuel Laman Blanchard

Journalism1804–1845

#family