If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

— Fernando Pessoa

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

— Fernando Pessoa

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

If the heart could think it would stop beating.

— Fernando Pessoa

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.

— Fernando Pessoa

I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

— Fernando Pessoa

I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not to be disturbed – and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveler’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.

— Fernando Pessoa

I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

— Fernando Pessoa

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I've sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. I've never had a knack for the active life. I've always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I've always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. Furthermore, I've always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn't tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn't live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.

— Fernando Pessoa

I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories.

— Fernando Pessoa