"There is no safe standard to tell man from animals."

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More by Fernando Pessoa

“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.”

“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.”

“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

"Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existe…"

— Francis Pharcellus Church

Business1839–1906

#life

"I want my Pope to be a traditionalist. Otherwise religion has no meaning, whatsoever. I'm not a bagel-and-lox Jew; let me put it to you that way. I stopped going to the temple a long time ago when the…"

— Michael Savage

Politics1942

#religion

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, un…"

— Willa Cather

Literature1873–1947

#nature

"Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't tur…"

— W. H. Auden

Politics1907–1973

#friendship