Poems: Fernando Pessoa

“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises

Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,

I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.

I was never convinced of what I believed in.

I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.

Words were my only truth.

When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.” 

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.” 

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.” 

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.” 

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.” 

― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

― Fernando Pessoa