Fernando Pessoa Quotes

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

So it is necessary that we should learn to be alone.

Sometimes I think I should have chosen a line of work where it was just me alone in the room, with the sun coming in, and God, insofar as he or she exists, smiling down upon me. Then I would have never been accused of being a tyrant, other than towards myself.

If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

I hit this point - I guess you'd say an end of a chapter - where I felt like I kind of did everything. I wasn't interested in music. It was a really strange feeling, and needless to say, it freaked me out a little bit. I really started to go inward and say, 'Hey, what is this about?'

But inside or out, I was alone, and I was beginning to wonder if I always had been, if I always would be.

So I saw that there was only me. There was only me who could worry about what was happening here, inside these walls of my life. Other people had their own worlds to worry about, and in the end, they had to fend for themselves, just like us.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui.

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

Isolation must precede true society.

To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.

Me, myself and I. That's all I got in the end.

The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.

Aloneness is a wise teacher. Kierkegaard remarked that one sign of spiritual maturity was the ability to be comfortable when alone.

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

Lacy was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized.

I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.