A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Quotes

“Four times in the false year the false season
Changed, in the immutable course
Of times's progression.
Dryness follows greenness, and greenness dryness,
And no one knows which is first, which
Is last, and they end.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“Leave in a complex state of slumber
Your consciousness of science.
Look At your white face in the wine’s red mirror
And then drink the mirror ...and your consciousness”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“How little hope ever attains! – Fernando Pessoa, from “The Scaffold,” A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics, 2006)”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“I got off the train
And said good-bye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I’m a man.
All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrines
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.

The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she’d been mistreated . . .

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“Nothing of nothing remains. We’re nothing.
In the sun and air we put off briefly
The unbreathable darkness of damp earth
Whose weight we’ll have to bear—
Postponed corpses that procreate.

Laws passed, statues seen, odes finished—
All have their grave. If we, heaps of flesh
Made sanguine by an inner sun,
Must set, then why not they?
We’re tales telling tales, nothing…”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“No one loves anyone else; he loves
What he finds of himself in other.
Don't fret if others don't love you. They feel
Who you are, and you're a stranger.
Be who you are, even if never loved.
Secure in yourself, you will suffer
Few Sorrows.
10 August 1932”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“I find it so natural not to think
That I sometimes start laughing, all by myself
About I don't know quite what, but it has to do
With there being people who think...

What does my wall think about my shadow?
Sometimes I wonder about this until I realize
I'm wondering about things...
And then I feel annoyed and out of sorts with myself,
As if I'd realized my foot was asleep...

What does one thing think about another?
Nothing thinks anything.
Is the earth aware of the stones and plants it contains?
If it were, it would be a person,
And if it were a person, it would have a person's nature, it wouldn't be the earth.
But what does all this matter to me?
If I thought about these things,
I would stop seeing the trees and plants
And would stop seeing the Earth,
Seeing nothing but my thoughts...
I would grow sad and remain in the dark.
The way I am, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“And so, in this universal river
Where I’m not a wave, but waves,
I languidly flow, with no requests
And no gods to hear them.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“And I also have the impression—a bit inconsistent,
Like a dream based on jumbled realities—
That I left myself on a seat in the streetcar,
To be found by whoever was going to sit down there next.

And I also have the impression—a bit hazy,
Like a dream one tries to remember on waking up to the dim
light of dawn—
That there’s something better in me than myself.

Yes, I also have the impression—a bit painful,
As of waking up without dreams to a day full of creditors—
That I bungled everything, like tripping on a doormat,
That I got everything wrong, like a suitcase without toilet articles,
That I replaced myself with something at some point in my life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“I’m nothing but nausea, nothing but reverie, nothing but longing.
I’m something very far removed, and I keep going
Just because my I feels cozy and profoundly real,
Stuck like a wad of spit to one of the world’s wheels.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe. — Álvaro de Campos, from “[I got off the train],” 4 July 1934, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa, ed. & trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics, 2006)”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“Ah, how I’d love to fall right from here
Through a trapdoor—clack!—to my grave!
Life tastes to me like mild tobacco.
All I ever did was smoke life away.
What I really want is faith and peace
And to get these sensations under control.
Put an end to this, God! Open the floodgates!
Enough of this comedy in my soul!”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“I don’t believe in anything but the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the outer universe conveyed to me by those sensations. I don’t see the outer universe, I don’t hear the outer universe, I don’t touch the outer universe. I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. It’s not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it’s not with the ears but with the soul that I hear; it’s not with the skin but with the soul that I touch. And if someone should ask me what the soul is, I’ll answer that it’s me. — Álvaro de Campos, from "Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro," A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. & transl. Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics, 2006)”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“Your slender hands, somewhat pale and somewhat my own, / Lay perfectly still in your lap that day, / As the scissors and thimble of another girl might lie. / You sat there lost in thought, looking at me as into space. / (I remember this so as to have something to think about without thinking.) / Suddenly, half sighing, you interrupted what you were being, / You consciously looked at me and said: / ‘It’s a pity every day can’t be like this.’ / Like that day that wasn’t anything … — Álvaro de Campos, from “Holiday Retreat,” A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. & transl. Richard Zenith (Penguin Classics, 2006)”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“I want the good, I want the bad, and in the end I want
nothing.
I toss in bed, uncomfortable on my right side, on my left
side,
And on my consciousness of existing,
I'm universally uncomfortable, metaphysically
uncomfortable,
But what's even worse is my headache.
That's more serious than the meaning of the universe.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“Beyond the bend in the road
There may be a well, and there may be a castle,
And there may be just more road.
I don’t know and don’t ask.
As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bend
I look only at the road before the bend,
Because the road before the bend is all I can see.
It would do me no good to look anywhere else
Or at what I can’t see.
Let’s pay attention only to where we are.
There’s enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.
If there are people beyond the bend in the road,
Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.
That, for them, is the road.
If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.
For now we know only that we’re not there.
Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bend
There’s the road without any bend.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems