You breathe better when you're rich - Fernando Pessoa

'I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern non religions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.

****

We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It’s a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.

Fernando Pessoa

 Odes

Of the gardens of Adonis, Lydia, I love
Most of all those fugitive roses
         That on the day they are born,
         That very day, must also die.
Eternal, for them, the light of day:
They're born when the sun is already high
         And die before Apollo's course

         Across the visible sky is run.
We too, of our lives, must make one day:
We never know, my Lydia, nor want
        To know of nights before or after
        The little while that we may last.

To be great, be whole: nothing that's you
         Should you exaggerate or exclude.
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
         In the least you ever do.
The whole moon, because it rides so

Autopsychography

The poet is a man who feigns

And feigns so thoroughly, at last

He manages to feign as pain

The pain he really feels,

And those who read what once he wrote

Feel clearly, in the pain they read,

Neither of the pains he felt,

Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track

There runs, to keep our reason busy,

The circling clockwork train of ours

That men agree to call a heart.

 If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.

* * *

  I multiplied myself to feel myself,

To feel myself I had to feel everything,

I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,

I undressed, I yielded

And in each corner

of my soul

there's an altar to a different god.

***

'My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?'

I'm upset by the happiness of all these jobless people who don't know they're unhappy. [...] 

Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables.

***

My joy is as painful as my pain.