Fernando Pessoa on Mind

"Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it."

"To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing."

"Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious."

"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."

"What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought."

"At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void."

"I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said."

"Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion."