Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help. I cannot tell you how to gain freedom since freedom exists within you.

Within yourself deliverance must be searched for, because each man makes his own prison.

A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.

I want you to have this feeling too - it is my moral responsibility to help you achieve this inner freedom.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.

Anything you believe you have to do or become before you can be free is a denial and distraction from the truth that you are already free.

There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm you have built a cocoon around yourself.... Burst your own cocoon and come out as the beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth.

Every practice at some point will become a hindrance. No practice can ever take you there, to freedom, to liberation. That's important to realize.

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

Nor from hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place.

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

My reasons to live Were my reasons to die But at least they were mine Now I've freedom unbound Cut the laces of life

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.

What do you want? You can't want to be happy, because that's too easy and too boring. You can't want only to love, because that's impossible. What do you want? You want to justify your life, to live it as intensely as possible. That is at once a trap and a source of ecstasy. Try to be alert to that danger and experience the joy and the adventure of being that woman who is beyond the image reflected in the mirror.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.