Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French...
NationalityPortuguese
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth13 June 1888
CityLisbon, Portugal
CountryPortugal
Fernando Pessoa quotes about
Life is good, but Wine is better.
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.
Liberty is the possibility of isolation.
Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.
Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.
Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
Life is a thread that someone entangled.
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.
If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.
The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.