FERNANDO PESSOA

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.

Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.

No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.

To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life.

Every man who deserves to be famous knows it is not worth the trouble.

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.

Against destiny I fulfilled my duty. Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.

Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am.

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

Whether or not they exist we are slaves to our gods.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

Faithful to the word given and the idea had.

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.

Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.