Quotes by Portuguese Authors

What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.
Alberto Caeiro
The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.
Magellan
I’m curious about everyone, hungry for everything, greedy for all ideas. My awareness that not everything can be seen, not everything read and not everything thought torments me like the loss of ..... But I don’t see with fixed attention, I don’t read with great care, and I don’t think with continuity. I’m an ardent and inconsequential dilettante in everything. My soul is too weak to sustain the force of its own enthusiasm. Made out of ruins of the unfinished, I’m definable as a landscape of resignations.
Fernando Pessoa
Books can change the world. They represent a second chance for those that want to change their life and can’t.
Robin Sacredfire
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
António R. Damásio
The joy of seeing another person in pain, frustrated or angry is a delicacy only for the most wicked.
Robin Sacredfire
Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.
José Luís Peixoto
Taking measures to ensure stability could assure the long-term economic growth and welfare at a global level
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
José Saramago
I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.
Fernando Pessoa
Mungkin kau harus berhenti memedulikan apa kata orang tentang dirimu.
Francisca Todi
If you find a book you like on Amazon, please buy it somewhere else!
Robin Sacredfire
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
Fernando Pessoa
Believe me, people do change and they change often and many times through their lifetime. However, due to naiveness, passivity and selfishness, they commonly change towards a more negative self, becoming less than they were. Positive changes are destined for those that seek them. Our world is, by default, designed to bring us down. In order to go up, one must consciously seek to dream and manifest dreams, by learning, reading, asking meaningful questions and actively making connections with others. One must, at least, love.
Robin Sacredfire
Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.
José Luís Peixoto
Whenever you are given two choices, look out for the third option.
Sara Arinto
Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!
Eça de Queirós
With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.
Fernando Pessoa
Whenever we talk about darkness and light, the terms seem so abstract that many consider the answers to be found in meditation and yoga, but I’m here to tell you that the answers are in the books you will never read, waiting all your life in the libraries you ignored and the bookstores you didn’t visit. I’m here to tell you as well that you are your own Satan and evil can’t possibly interfere more in your life than what you’re already doing to yourself by remaining ignorant. Until you choose the light, darkness is your personal choice, and there’s no reason to feel any empathy for you.
Robin Sacredfire
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
José Saramago
He could see perfectly well that "it," his life, was leading nowhere, that he wss behaving like a miser who hoards gold simply for the pleasure of looking at it, except that in his case it wssn't gold but experience, which was the one thing he took from life. And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. There is no point in a man accumulating experience the way someone else might collect stamps.
José Saramago
This is neither the time nor the place, however, to ponder how often the soul, in order to be able to boast of a clean body, has burdened itself with sadness, envy, and impurity.
José Saramago
... that destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere, destiny alone knows what it has cost ...
José Saramago
May the sun come, it's a new day; In the pure land of fantasy; That our darkness enlightened
Miguel Torga
What I wear on and off stage is my mask. You see, a mask doesn't hide you, it exposes you.
Nuno Roque
When we understand that Peace is a state of mind we understand true Peace.
Tony Samara
A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly.That’s human action on the outside world.We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;And the sun is always punctual every day.(5/7/14)
Alberto Caeiro
I saw that there is no Nature,That Nature doesn’t exist,That there are hills, valleys, plains,That there are trees, flowers, weeds,That there are rivers and stones,But there is not a whole these belong to,That a real and true wholenessIs a sickness of our ideas.
Alberto Caeiro
I have a tendency to break rules and shake things up. I would say that with me people never know what is real and what is fiction. And I like that because reality is relative.
Nuno Roque
Armed I am with love. Disarmed I am.
Manuel Alegre
I have seen enough. I am ready to see the world die.
Robin Sacredfire
The wicked ones make us better persons for those that deserve our attention. Nothing is really lost and wasted in this alchemical dance of life.
Robin Sacredfire
Even on the saddest nightin times of servitudethere is always someone who resiststhere is always someone who says no.
Manuel Alegre
The book: an umbrella against ignorance
André Letria
However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.
José Saramago
We must always reflect only what we wish to see reflected within us.
Robin Sacredfire
Apple and apricot seeds contain a vitamin called B12, which I found to be illegal to sell in pharmacies. Now, this is very interesting. You can buy all kind of vitamins in pharmacies, but not B12. Why in the hell would the pharmaceutical industry make a vitamin that we can eat on our own, through seeds, illegal? I asked this question to employees in the pharmacies and many doctors, and they couldn't answer. They just kept looking at me as if I was trying to get ingredients to make my own synthetic drugs. For most people, what is illegal is really illegal. Most people are too stupid to think for themselves, even when my question is so obvious that they seem to have brain damage not to realize the relevance of such question.
Robin Sacredfire
The human soul is an abyss
Fernando Pessoa
There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.
Fernando Pessoa
Sometimes you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists.
José Mourinho
I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
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
Spiritual practice is allowing the temple (your body) to be full of light and to live life as a total celebration.
Tony Samara
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. 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
Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.Each thing only reminds us of what it isAnd 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
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...
Fernando Pessoa
Time and time again one has seen, even in people not particularly given to reflection, that the best way of finding a solution is to let one’s thoughts drift until the right moment comes to pounce, like a tiger taking its prey by surprise.
José Saramago
(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests.
Eça de Queirós
My childhood was a drag show!
Nuno Roque
That thing over there was more there than it’s there!Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn’t exist.But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,And the rest are the dreams men have,The myopia of someone who doesn’t look very much,
Alberto Caeiro
We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.
Fernando Pessoa
..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
José Saramago
People always get exactly what they believe to deserve, despite the fact that they may be unhappy with what they have. We are 100% responsible for our destiny, and I would dare to say 200%, because we do create the conditions for the future we end up attracting to our life. But the challenge is in learning to see it, and noticing how we do this. Therefore, there's really nothing to regret about life.
Robin Sacredfire
All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them.
Nuno Roque
But what you’re calling poetry is what everything is. It’s not even poetry — it’s seeing. These materialists are blind. You told me they say space is infinite. Where do they see that in space?”And I, disconcerted: “But don’t you think of space as infinite? Can’t you conceive of space as infinite?”“I don’t conceive of anything as being infinite. How could I conceive of anything as being infinite?”“But, man,” I said, “Imagine space. Beyond that space is more space, and beyond that more, and then more, and more... It never ends...““Why?” asked my master Caeiro.
Álvaro de Campos
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.
Fernando Pessoa
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
José Saramago
Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.
José Saramago
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
Fernando Pessoa
Despite the experiences that put me in the spotlight as the co-creator of my wisdom, the human part of me keeps burning, like an alchemical process that I both accept and want to refuse. You see, it's hard when I notice women falling in love with me, and then destroying everything at the same time. And so, I'm changing the world as much as this world is changing me. The two things are inseparable.
Robin Sacredfire