Fernando Pessoa Quotes

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that's why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.

I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.

I enjoy writing, I enjoy my house, my family and, more than anything I enjoy the feeling of seeing each day used to the full to actually produce something. The end.

The whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it's just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Like, I'm supposed to be writing this book, but - heh heh heh - I'm writing a movie, secretly. I'm procrastinating, and in my off-hours I'm working on this movie that I'm not allowed to do, because I'm supposed to be writing a book!

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.

Work saves us from melancholy. Pleasure exposes us to it.

I am always writing. It is not always good, but if I am writing, I am usually happy.

To work is to feel alive.

Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.

Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There's a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going.

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.

Occasionally when I'm procrastinating writing, I'll while away the hours on iTunes. You can just keep going forever and find these bands you'd never normally hear of.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.

There is only one real happiness in life, and that is the happiness of creating.

I'm happiest when I have something to focus my energy on.

Work is the most nourishing thing so far in my life.

I write a lot more when I'm happy, because you're hopeful, you're motivated.