Fernando Pessoa Quotes

It obviously makes a difference whether we consider ourselves as pawns in a game whose rules we call reality or as players of the game who know that the rules are ‘real’ only to the extent that we have created or accepted them, and that we can change them.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

Once you start thinking about the lies people tell when they don't know they're telling them, the truths people reveal when they think they're lying, then you can start to build a world.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky.” “No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

Reality is a magic lady, sometimes very mysterious. To me she is very passionate. She is real not only when she is awake, walking down the streets, but also at night when she is dreaming or when she is having nightmares. When I am writing, I am always paying tribute to her - to that lady called Reality.

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, but not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else — what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.