Fernando Pessoa Quotes

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

I did not lose myself all at once.

Me personally, I'm a guy who it took a long time to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. I relate to a lot of that finding oneself a little later in the game, or being thrown a curve later in the game.

By the time I went to Yale, I'd been acting for a long time and I was really tired of it. I was restless - and a little bored - and I was really eager to investigate different parts of myself.

Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity.

We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are. And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.

I find myself only by losing myself.

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.

Aren't you afraid?' 'Of what?' 'Of losing yourself.' 'That's what I'm hoping for.

She is well practiced in the art of losing herself.

Time is the enemy of identity

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life

My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.

Sometimes you have to lose everything in order to gain yourself.

What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?

I don't know if you know who you are, until you lose who you are.

I think about Lenaya and Hugh. Will they know how much I've changed this year? Will they have changed too? I'll wait until tomorrow to find out. And then it's possible I won't find out after all. Because some changes happen deep down inside of you. And the truth is, only you know about them. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You don't lose what you never had.

I used to be somebody. Now I’m somebody else.

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.

In the ardor of his enthusiasm, a youth set forth in quest of a man of whom he might take counsel as to his future, but after long search and many disappointments, he came near relinquishing the pursuit as hopeless, when suddenly it occurred to him that one must first be a man to find a man, and profiting by this suggestion, he set himself to the work of becoming himself the man he had been seeking so long and fruitlessly.

I myself am still learning how to be me and that's OK. It can take a really long time to become the person you really want to be. Be who you are. It's the greatest gift we can give to ourselves, our community and our world.