Quotes by Portuguese Authors - Page 6

Ban privileges. The rules of the game should be the same to all players, regardless of their size, location, or any other criteria
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
António R. Damásio
One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.
José Saramago
People use masks in public and then wonder why their personal life, their relationships, don't work. If you're not being honest with others, there's nothing real about yourself to learn and, the wider the gap, the deeper the suffering. The heart wasn't meant to be closed in a box made of fake feelings and thoughts.
Robin Sacredfire
I love the idea of reincarnation, so just in case it doesn't exist, I decided to be different people in the same lifetime.
Nuno Roque
The New Economy brings the need to tap people’s curiosity, quest for knowledge and understanding, in order to develop a sustainable society.
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
The practice is simple. Whatever you're doing, do that with total awareness.
Tony Samara
Let’s only care about the place where we are.There’s beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.If there’s someone beyond the curve in the road,Let them worry about what’s past the curve in the road,That’s what the road is to them.
Alberto Caeiro
Monitor, transparently, and enforce the separation of Democracy powers: Legislative; Executive; Judicial
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
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 me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.
Fernando Pessoa
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
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
Fernando Pessoa
In our dreams we find the dreams of others and in other’s dreams we find ourselves. No will is separated from others and no dream is in itself isolated from the will of God.
Robin Sacredfire
Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.
Fernando Pessoa
Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
Alberto Caeiro
I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.
Nuno Roque
... we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ...
José Saramago
I had no idea you were capable of such a diabolical plan, Human, my friend, just human, the devil doesn’t make plans, anyway, if men were good, he wouldn’t even exist.
José Saramago
... it's all words and only words, and beyond the words there's nothing... a word, which, like all the others, can only be explained by more words, but since the words we use to explain things, successfully or not, will, in turn, have to be explained, our conversation will lead nowhere, the mistaken and the true will alternate, like some kind of curse, and we'll never know what's right and what's wrong. - subhro, the mahout, Pg. 49
José Saramago
We don’t live in a free market society… markets are controlled by the major players who influence legislation to perpetuate their control...
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
Reincarnation isn't something in which I choose to believe but rather a truth I accept. Most people will never know the meaning of their friendships, passions, choices and even challenges. I embrace them, knowing that there’s always a perfect correlation between everything, including between us and the ones that love us and betray us at the end. That’s how I know I’m almost never traveling somewhere but returning, or not meeting someone but fixing the past, or facing a challenge but ending a karmic cycle. If I was a Buddhist Monk, a Scottish Doctor, a French Monarch, or a Spanish Templar, none of that really matters, not as much as what I experienced and believed during that time, not as much as what I did ten years ago or what I believed during my childhood, not as much as who I am now and what I can do with my life at present time.
Robin Sacredfire
When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.
Álvaro de Campos
He imagined that he was looking for her and couldn't find her anywhere, that the two of them were lost on a vast ship, sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another, the woman is sleeping only a few yards away from him and he cannot reach her, yet it's so very easy to go from port to starboard.
José Saramago
There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.
José Saramago
God operates in levels. First He changes your life to help you see opportunities, and you can't appreciate it. Then He sends you people that can help you, and you refuse to trust them. Then, He boosts your vitality, so that you might still be able to do something for yourself, but you conform to your lifestyle and habits. Then, He ignores you, until you realize, through your own suffering, that you've offended Him in all these ways.
Robin Sacredfire
What does spirituality, money and happiness have in common? Everything.
Robin Sacredfire
What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
Fernando Pessoa
A red nose is the clown's mask and my moustache is mine.
Nuno Roque
If you want to accurately judge the spiritual level of any human being, count the number of religions that he is capable of understanding and observe how effective he is in applying the lessons learned to his own life or the life of others.
Robin Sacredfire
There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.No wind whatsoever brought you now.Now you’re here.What you were isn’t you, or else the whole rose would be here.
Alberto Caeiro
The wider our conscience, the wider the impact of our actions, and I do believe someone with more light has the moral duty to enlighten others.
Robin Sacredfire
Whenever we talk about darkness and light, the terms seem so abstract that many consider the answers to be found in meditation and yoga, but I’m here to tell you that the answers are in the books you will never read, waiting all your life in the libraries you ignored and the bookstores you didn’t visit. I’m here to tell you as well that you are your own Satan and evil can’t possibly interfere more in your life than what you’re already doing to yourself by remaining ignorant. Until you choose the light, darkness is your personal choice, and there’s no reason to feel any empathy for you.
Robin Sacredfire
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...
Fernando Pessoa
Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.
José Saramago
Ban short-selling, high speed trading and all other instruments of pure speculation
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
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
Whatever the religion, we are formatted to accept hierarchy without any questions and while most management studies discuss business models, organisation and power structure, they seldom question the different types of hierarchies. One has to wonder if this hierarchy really is an absolute truth…
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
Most people believe that sharing the same flesh and blood, the same basic DNA structure, makes them your family. How sad that is. Because, you see, as a spiritual person, I believe you must deserve a family, not just own it. If those that are my family, don't behave as such, they are not my family. If I have chosen them before I was born, I have been betrayed. I owe them nothing, in this or the many lives to come. In fact, if they betray me in this life, they will return as my enemies in the next. And their karma will make me victorious in that future confrontation.
Robin Sacredfire
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
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
Fernando Pessoa
To pretend is to know oneself.
Fernando Pessoa
I saw that there is no Nature,That Nature doesn’t exist,That there are hills, valleys, plains,That there are trees, flowers, weeds,That there are rivers and stones,But there is not a whole these belong to,That a real and true wholenessIs a sickness of our ideas.
Alberto Caeiro
Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations
Miguel Reynolds Brandao
In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.
José Saramago
All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected.
José Eduardo Agualusa
The duality and the freewill don't exist. There's only one choice to be made, the one that bring us upwards. Self-destruction is not a choice. And yet, every duality presents exactly that, and not really a choice.
Robin Sacredfire
There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs
José Saramago
In our dreams, we find the dreams of others, and in other’s dreams we find ourselves. No will is separated from others and no dream is in itself isolated from the will of God.
Robin Sacredfire
Ask the person who found you about what kind of people they were looking for before meeting you, as they may not know that they have found one of them already.
Robin Sacredfire
Que as nossas palavras ressoem para sempre pela eternidade e que nunca sejam esquecidas. Se por ventura se perderem perdidos estaremos.
Rute Canhoto
The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?
Alberto Caeiro
The secret to success is no secret. Be honest in your words, be trustworthy and share value. Most people won't tell the difference, but those that do are your readers.
Robin Sacredfire
Some people think they are punishing me when they hit their head against a wall. If that's not insane, I wonder what is. Yeah, I'm going to punish you for being my boyfriend, by insulting you and destroying our relationship. I'm going to punish you for taking me on vacations, by disappearing, even if you are the one with the house keys. I'm going to punish you for giving me books to read, by not reading them. I'm going to punish you for complaining about my behavior, by becoming a much worse person. And well, why not, I'm going to commit suicide to prove you my life has no value and you are wrong in thinking it does? It's so sad when people are literally as stupid and dumb as they are insane.
Robin Sacredfire
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
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
José Saramago
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
He who serves two masters has to lie to one.
Portuguese Proverb
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
Everything that you want in life, is possible. But the reflection in the mirror will always show who is reflecting. One can’t change the reflection without changing himself.
Robin Sacredfire
I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.
Fernando Pessoa