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‘The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.
The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator…the voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means…ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!’
— Fernando Pessoa
Posted on December 26, 2011 via /cities with 4 notes
Source: cities
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Fate frightens me, Lydia. Nothing is certain.
At any moment something could happen
To change all that we are.
When we leave what is known, the very step
We take is strange. Grave numens guard
The customary boundaries.
We are not gods: blind, we fear,
And prefer the meager life we know
To novelty, the abyss.—Fernando Pessoa
(via ontheborderland)
Posted on August 25, 2010 via On the Borderland. with 65 notes
Source: ontheborderland
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Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our souls and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thoughts our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.
Fernando Pessoa
(english sonnets)Posted on May 25, 2010 via dataobscura with 23 notes
Source: dataobscura
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We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky.
Fernando Pessoa (via devilduck) (via crashinglybeautiful) -
Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood. I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box—but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via ontheborderland) (via crashinglybeautiful)Posted on April 2, 2010 via On the Borderland. with 83 notes
Source: ontheborderland
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We belonged to no age and had no purpose. For us the ultimate purpose of all beings and things had remained at the door of that paradise of absence. The souls all around us, so as to feel us feel them, had become perfectly still: from the woody soul of the branches to the reaching soul of their leaves, from the nubile soul of flowers to the dangling soul of fruits…
And thus we died our life, so individually intent on dying it that we never noticed that we were only one, that we were each an illusion of the other, and that each of us – as a separate self – was nothing on the inside but an echo of that self…Fernando Pessoa, In the Forest of Estrangement (1913) -
In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personalities from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via ontheborderland)Posted on March 14, 2010 via On the Borderland. with 73 notes
Source: ontheborderland
