I was born subject like others to errors and defects, But never to the error of wanting to understand too much, Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect. Never to the defect of demanding of the World That it is anything that’s not the World.

— Alberto Caeiro

Let’s be simple and calm, Like brooks and trees, And God will love us by making Beautiful things like the trees and brooks for us, And give us greenness in his spring, And a river for us to go to when we end...

— Alberto Caeiro

Let’s only care about the place where we are. There’s beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else. If there’s someone beyond the curve in the road, Let them worry about what’s past the curve in the road, That’s what the road is to them.

— Alberto Caeiro

Lightly, lightly, very lightly, A wind passes very lightly And goes away, always very lightly. And I don’t know what I think And I don’t want to know.

— Alberto Caeiro

Live, you say, in the present;Live only in the present. But I don’t want the present, I want reality;I want things that exist, not time that measures them. What is the present? It’s something relative to the past and the future. It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing. I only want reality, things without the present. I don’t want to include time in my scheme. I don’t want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things. I don’t want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present. I shouldn’t even treat them as real. I should treat them as nothing. I should see them, only see them;See them till I can’t think about them. See them without time, without space, To see, dispensing with everything but what you see. And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science.

— Alberto Caeiro

Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.

— Alberto Caeiro

Night doesn’t fall for my eyes But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes. Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts The night falls concretely And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.

— Alberto Caeiro

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it. Each thing only reminds us of what it island it’s only what nothing else is. The fact that it’s it separates it from every other thing.(Everything’s nothing without another thing that’s not it).

— Alberto Caeiro

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing. I know they smell just as well as I know I existed. They’re things known from the outside. But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.

— Alberto Caeiro

On a Whitley cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid, And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.

— Alberto Caeiro