Álvaro de Campos Quotes

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead.

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, “Are you at peace with yourself?” and he answered, “No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

the Great Vaccination — the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.

and the idea of nothingness — the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling — has, in my dear master’s work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.

But what you’re calling poetry is what everything is. It’s not even poetry — it’s seeing. These materialists are blind. You told me they say space is infinite. Where do they see that in space?”And I, disconcerted: “But don’t you think of space as infinite? Can’t you conceive of space as infinite?”“I don’t conceive of anything as being infinite. How could I conceive of anything as being infinite?”“But, man,” I said, “Imagine space. Beyond that space is more space, and beyond that more, and then more, and more... It never ends...““Why?” asked my master Caeiro.

Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.

It’s stupid, but it’s human, and that’s how it is.