- "All is worthwhile if the soul is not small."
- "I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided."
- " I wasn't meant for reality, but life came and found me."
- "I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist."
- "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."
- "We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect."
- "To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think."
- "The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."
- "Whether or not they exist, we are slaves to our gods."
- "Without madness what is man, but a wholesome beast,postponed corpse that breeds"
- "I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays."
- "There's something vile in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes."
- "I always live in the present. The future I can'y know. The past I no longer have."
- "Oh salty sea, how much of your salt are tears from Portugal?"
- "All beginning are involuntary".
- "There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were".
- "Better to dream than to be."
- "My past is everything I failed to be".
- "What is art but the denial of life?"
- "Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being".
- "Beauty is the name of something that doesn't exist".
- Fernando Pessoa
Portuguese poet, writer and philosopher