Fernando Pessoa on Life

"Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions."

"All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does."

"I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing."

"Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it."

"Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life."

"It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living."

"There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful."

"As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes."

"The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels."

"To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life."

"The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax."

"Life is a thread that someone entangled."

"All problems are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be."

"Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one."

"To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived."

"I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life."

"It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended."

"If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave."

"Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary."

"That's not my love; that's just your life."

"God wills, man dreams, the work is born."

"My life is as if you've hit me with it."

"What is art but the denial of life?"

"The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man."

"If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue."

"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."

"In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation."

"I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted."

"Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally."

"Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things."