{"author":"Fernando Pessoa","author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa","total_quotes":106,"quotes":[{"text":"A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["experience","growing-older"],"id":2739,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["potential","successful","being "],"id":3165,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["humour"],"id":8535,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["dreams","duality","life","poetry","thoughts"],"id":8542,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn’t be love letters if they were not Ridiculous.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["fernando","letters","love","pessoa","poem","ridiculous"],"id":9750,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["freedom","isolation","self-sufficiency","servant","slave","slavery"],"id":11744,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"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.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["dreams","estrangement","exile","imagination","stranger","visions"],"id":21743,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"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.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["action","dynamic","identity","individualism","motion","philosophy","self","static"],"id":32745,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["books","literature","metaphors","reading","words"],"id":32873,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["leaders"],"id":35287,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":106,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}