It’s stranger than every strangenessAnd the dreams of all the poetsAnd the thoughts of all the philosophers,That things are really what they seem to beAnd there’s nothing to understand.

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

I don’t know how to talk because I’m feeling.I’m listening to my voice as if it were someone else’s,And my voice is speaking about her as if she were speaking.She has hair as blond as...

Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist,...

Accept the universeAs the gods gave it to you.If the gods wanted to give you something elseThey’d have done it.If there are other matters and other worldsThere are.

A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly.That’s human action on the outside world.We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we...

Why?” asked my master Caeiro.

Yes, this is what my senses alone have learned:—Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs,And isn’t cured from the outside,Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink,Or...

Les dieux sont ceux qui ne doutent jamais.

I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing,And I look at flowers and I smile…I don’t know if they understand meOr if I understand them,But I know the truth is in...

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,And his sheep are straying on the hillside,And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.No one came to him or...

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

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...

The river of my village doesn’t make you think about anything.When you’re at its bank you’re only at its bank.

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

If I talk about her like she’s a beingIt’s because talking about her I need to use the language of menWhich gives personality to things,And imposes a name on things.

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.Each thing only reminds us of what it isAnd it’s only what nothing else is.The fact that it’s it separates it from...

In our forestspart divineand makes her heart palpitatewild and tame are one. What a delicious Sound!

I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.

If I die very young, hear this:I was never anything but a kid playing.I was a heathen like the sun and the water,I had the universal religion only people don’t have.I was happy because I...

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...

It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the...

I was born subject like others to errors and defects,But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..Never to the defect of...

And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,And commerce, and the ships leavingTheir smoke on the high seas.Because he knows all of this lacks the truthA flower has in its bloomingAnd which moves with...

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

But if God is the trees and the flowersAnd the hills and the moonlight and the sun,Why should I call him God?I call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moonlight;Because if he...

I pass and I stay, like the Universe.

Se nu er jeg borte fra byens larm ogtrængsel og aviser og mennesker, jeg erflygtet fra det altsammen fordi det igjenkaldte på mig fra landet og ensomhetenhvor jeg er fra. Du skal se det kommertil...

I love flowers for being flowers, directly.And I love trees for being trees without my thought.

I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am.I only regret not having loved you.Put your hands in mineAnd let’s be quiet, surrounded by life.

It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the...

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,And Spring came the day after tomorrow,I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow.If that’s its time, when else should it come?I like it...

One day when God fell asleepAnd the Holy Ghost went off flying,He got into a box of miracles and stole three.With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run...

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...

I’m a keeper of flocks.The flock is my thoughtsAnd my thoughts are all sensations.I think with my eyes and with my earsAnd with my hands and feetAnd with my nose and mouth.Thinking about a flower...

Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos.

I’m one of my sensations.

Other times when I hear the wind blowI feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.

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.

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.But what is it, a row of trees? It’s just trees.Row and the plural trees aren’t things, they’re names.

He’s taught me everything.He taught me how to look at things.He shows me everything there is in flowers.He shows me how stones are pleasingWhen you hold them in your handAnd look at them for a...

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

Lightly, lightly, very lightly,A wind passes very lightlyAnd goes away, always very lightly.And I don’t know what I thinkAnd I don’t want to know.

The Tejo runs down from SpainAnd the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.Everybody knows that.But not many people know the river of my villageAnd where it comes fromAnd where it’s going.And so, because it...

All of nature is in me, and a bit of myself is in all of nature.

And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrowWill be another thunderstorm than if...

man” goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.How perfect that he is in...