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"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
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Exlpore more Art quotes
"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."
"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."
"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."
"As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher."
"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."
"Great artists are a little too gifted to be bound by boxes and labels, and in saying that, the label 'artist' is to be used lightly."
Explore more quotes by Fernando Pessoa
"Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform."
"To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky."
"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many."
"With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy."
"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."
"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream."
"I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self."
"The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt."
"In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us, we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers."
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