Fernando Pessoa Quotes

We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

There is no standard for truth. We cannot even agree on the meaning of words.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

Designer' is meant to mean whatever it means.

The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.

I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.

You gave me a significant look, but significant of what?

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

The text has disappeared under the interpretation.

Take it in what sense thou wilt.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.

What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?" "Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire." "But, I saw-" "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind." "What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.

From this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundation of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

History is the great propagator of doubt.

Moral: It all depends.