Quotes by Portuguese Authors - Page 4

The one who runs from his shadows sleeps with the devil at night.
Robin Sacredfire
Whenever you are given two choices, look out for the third option.
Sara Arinto
The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore... Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible... It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors... to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.
Ferdinand Magellan
Most people think that making a living from books is fun or joyful, but there's much more to it than what the eyes can see, and I wish I had more time for more profitable and also joyful activities.
Robin Sacredfire
I'm not into writing many more books or more pages. My goal is to increase the value of each sentence I write. And for that, I have to just erase my past and bring only forward what matches the new me, things I can easily rewrite and adapt to my new perspective.
Robin Sacredfire
Blessed are the ones who offer coffee to writers, for they will get all the rewards mentioned in the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
Robin Sacredfire
Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.
Robin Sacredfire
To those that don't believe I'm worth more than what they think of other authors, to hell with them. Call me arrogant and call the police of politeness on me if you wish, because I won't stop until anyone that thinks that is erased from history. I will not only become immortal, but annihilate the memory of the ignorant from the face of the earth. My work will persist in the battles against the stupid and for thousands of years after I'm gone.
Robin Sacredfire
I might act like a rhinoceros, but I'm a unicorn.
Nuno Roque
Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.
Fernando Pessoa
I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted - and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.
Fernando Pessoa
I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories.
Fernando Pessoa
I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.
Fernando Pessoa
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.
José Saramago
Why they were loaded with bags of beans and peas and anything else they happened to pick up when they were still some distance away from the street where the first blind man and his wife lived, for that is where they are going, is a question that could only occur to someone who has never in his life suffered shortages.
José Saramago
Sometimes I have to act crazy to handle the crazies. Trying to be normal near the crazies makes me as crazy as them. The more I push reason and logic on them, the more they pervert it and use it against me, the angrier they make me feel. It's much easier to pretend they're ghosts talking to the wind, and ignore them as if they weren't really human. My mood improves, my self-esteem is better and I feel happier. On another hand, maybe I'm just being realistic here, because you can't really talk to the dead. That's what people without respect or empathy are; dead in the brain; just walking bodies without a soul.
Robin Sacredfire
Yes, this is what my senses alone have learned:—Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
Alberto Caeiro
Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,Even when there’s not a breeze at all, it seemsLike there’s a light breeze blowing for a minuteBut the trees are unmovingIn every leaf of their leavesAnd our feelings have had an illusion,An illusion of what would please them...
Alberto Caeiro
I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.
Álvaro de Campos
Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.
José Saramago
old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him -- or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.
José Saramago
If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.I’m a mystic, but only in my body,My soul is simple and doesn’t think.
Alberto Caeiro
At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.
Fernando Pessoa
Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.
Fernando Pessoa
Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.
Fernando Pessoa
A person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks, questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of a long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don't go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent.
José Saramago
I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.
Nuno Roque
Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)
Fernando Pessoa
From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I
Fernando Pessoa
I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.Nobody goes faster than the legs they have.If where I want to go is far away, I’m not there in an instant.
Alberto Caeiro
A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to travel but to reach harbour. We found ourselves on the high seas, with no idea of which port we should be aiming for.
Fernando Pessoa
There are two kinds of persons which cannot be trusted in this world : the ones who do not greet you with a firm handshake and the ones who do not eat prawn heads.
Nelson Carvalheiro
I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not to be disturbed – and also because I think that the world doesn’t need more than the natural evils it already has. All of us in this world are living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another, and we should treat each other with a traveller’s cordiality. Not to do good, because I don’t know what good is, nor even if I do it when I think I do. How do I know what evils I generate if I give a beggar money? How do I know what evils I produce if I teach or instruct? Not knowing, I refrain. And besides, I think that to help or clarify is, in a certain way, to commit the evil of interfering in the lives of others. Kindness depends on a whim of our mood, and we have no right to make others the victims of our whims, however humane or kind-hearted they may be. Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.
Fernando Pessoa
I could doubt the value of my books as much as many do, except that, as a researcher and very curious person, I do read a lot too, and can clearly see the difference in value between what I do and what others do. I have no doubt that my books have much more value than nearly all others out there, and it wouldn't make sense for me to be an author if I couldn't see that, or if I saw the opposite, as I believe that, if we're not upgrading mankind, we're just making it lost and vulnerable to the claws of ignorance.
Robin Sacredfire
Honesty and kindness can do much more for the world than anything else. And logic will always be weak without a strong heart. That is why the wisest tend to suffer the most from heartbreak. One cannot reach for God in His wisdom with the heart of a devil.
Robin Sacredfire
Fortunately the essence of this revelation did not escape Mary despite the angel's obscure speech, and, much surprised, she asked him, So Jesus is my son and the son of the Lord, Woman, what are you saying, show some respect for rank and precedence, what you must say is the son of the Lord and me, Of the Lord and of you, No, of the Lord and of you, You're confusing me, just answer my question, is Jesus our son, You mean to say the Lord's son because you only served to bear the child, So the Lord didn't choose me, Don't be absurd (...) Is there any real proof that it was the Lord's seed which engendered my first-born, Well, it's a delicate matter, and what you're demanding is nothing less than a paternity test which in these mixed unions, no matter how many analyses, tests, and globule counts one carries out, can never give conclusive results.
José Saramago
The lamb, having survived the storm unharmed and no longer afraid, came up to Jesus and put its mouth to his lips, there was no sniffing, one touch was all that was needed. Jesus opened his eyes, saw the lamb, then the livid sky like a black hand blocking whatever light remained. The olive tree still burned. His bones ached when he tried to move, but at least he was in one piece, if that can be said of a body so fragile that it takes only a clap of thunder to knock it to the ground. He sat up with some effort and reassured himself, more by touch than by sight, that he was neither burned nor paralyzed, none of his bones were broken, and apart from a loud buzzing in his head as insistent as the drone of a trumpet, he was all right. He drew the lamb to him and said, Don’t be afraid, He only wanted to show you that you would have been dead by now if that was His will, and to show me that it was not I who saved your life but He. One last rumble of thunder slowly tore the air like a sigh, while below, the white patch of the flock seemed a beckoning oasis.Struggling to overcome his weakness, Jesus descended the slope. The lamb, kept on its cord simply as a precaution, trotted at his side like a little dog.
José Saramago
Very few are brave enough to look at the portals to higher dimensions of conscience that open before their eyes, either they’re confronting them from one perspective or another. These portals represent amazing opportunities for the ones with the courage to see them and cross them. But only a very powerful person possesses the power to open one for others. And if you think that person is what it seems, you will neglect the magician hiding behind the illusion.
Robin Sacredfire
A full moon, although less splendid than that earlier on,lit everything around. Before I reached the point where I would have to leave the road and set off across country, the narrow path I was following seemed suddenly to end and disappear behind a large hedge, and there before me, as if blocking my way, stood a single, tall tree, very dark at first against the transparently clear night sky. Out of nowhere, a breeze got up. It set the tender stems of the grasses shivering, made the green blades of the reeds shudder and sent a ripple across the brown waters of a puddle. Like a wave, it lifted up the spreading branches of the tree and, murmuring, climbed the trunk, and then, suddenly, the leaves turned their undersides to the moon and the whole beech tree (because it was a beech) was covered in white as far as the topmost branch.It was only a moment, no more than that, but the memory of it will last as long as my life lasts.
José Saramago
And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.
Fernando Pessoa
Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.
Alberto Caeiro
The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent.
José Saramago
Memory is like a curse. We fall into eternity, and memory is a weight that keeps pulling us to where we can never go back to.
José Luís Peixoto
All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching.I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.
Fernando Pessoa
For organisations to become truly sustainable we believe it is essential to create a new organisation model: a more cooperative leader, a new way for people to cooperate inside the organisation and a new way for organisations to be measured by society.
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.
Fernando Pessoa
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
Fernando Pessoa
The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.
José Saramago
Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
Let’s be simple and calm,Like brooks and trees,And God will love us by makingBeautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,And give us greenness in his spring,And a river for us to go to when we end...
Alberto Caeiro
One day when God fell asleepAnd the Holy Ghost went off flying,He got into a box of miracles and stole three.With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run away.With the second he made himself a human boy forever.With the third he created a Christ eternally crucifiedAnd left him nailed to the cross that there is in HeavenWhere he’s used as a model for other crosses.Then he ran away to the sunAnd came down on the first ray he caught.
Alberto Caeiro
I’m a keeper of flocks.The flock is my thoughtsAnd my thoughts are all sensations.I think with my eyes and with my earsAnd with my hands and feetAnd with my nose and mouth.Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling itAnd eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.That’s why when on a hot dayI feel sad from liking it so much,And I throw myself lengthwise on the grassAnd shut my hot eyes,And feeling my whole body lying on reality,I know the truth and I’m happy.
Alberto Caeiro
And sometimes if I wantTo imagine I’m a lamb(Or a whole flockSpreading out all over the hillsideSo I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset,Or when a cloud passes its hand over the lightAnd silence runs over the grass outside.When I sit and write poemsOr, walking along the roads or pathways,I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,I feel a staff in my handAnd see my silhouetteOn top of a knoll,Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,With a silly smile like someone who doesn’t understand what somebody’s sayingBut tries to pretend they do.
Alberto Caeiro
We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep…
José Saramago
Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.
Álvaro de Campos
Sinto que há uma estranha eternidade naquilo que amámos e foi destruído.(I feel that there lies a strange eternity in that which we loved but has been destroyed.)
Al Berto
..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
José Saramago
What happens when you give people a 2nd chance? They blame you for it. What happens when you give people a 3rd chance? They ridicule you. What happens when you give them a 4th chance? They make sure they will have a 5th. What happens when you give them a 5th? They blame you for everything and laugh at you. What happens when you give them a 6th? At this point, they try to kill you by accident before you even have another chance of leaving them. What happens when you give them a 7th chance? They punish you for all the chances you have given them before and betray you in the most horrible way they can, proving that they didn’t deserve not even one chance at anything. Forgiveness is not for everyone, and those that deserve it never reach the point of even needing it.
Robin Sacredfire
If, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much talked of immortality.
José Saramago
The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.
Ferdinand Magellan