Alberto Caeiro Quotes

Alberto Caeiro Quotes

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

What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.

Pensar incomoda como andar à chuva
Quando o vento cresce e parece que chove mais.

If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I’m lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don’t need reason - I have shoulderblades.

I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.
Nobody goes faster than the legs they have.
If where I want to go is far away, I’m not there in an instant.

I’m in no hurry. What for?
The sun and moon aren’t in a hurry: they’re right.
Hurrying is believing people can get past their legs,
Or that, jumping, they can land past their shadow.
No; I don’t know how to hurry.

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

Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.

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

That thing over there was more there than it’s there!
Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesn’t exist.
But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,
And the rest are the dreams men have,
The myopia of someone who doesn’t look very much,

Nature never remembers, that’s why she’s beautiful.

Water’s water and that’s why it’s beautiful.

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.

It’s stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there’s nothing to understand.

The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset. But what does someone who hates
The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?

Also at times, on the surface of streams,
Water?bubbles form
And grow and burst
And have no meaning at all
Except that they’re water?bubbles
Growing and bursting.

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.

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.

Praise be to God I’m not good,
And have the natural egotism of flowers
And rivers following their bed
Preoccupied without knowing it
Only with blooming and flowing.
This is the only mission in the World,
This - to exist clearly,
And to know how to do it without thinking about it.)

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.
To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.
I’m a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

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

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

Let’s be simple and calm,
Like brooks and trees,
And God will love us by making
Beautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,
And give us greenness in his spring,
And a river for us to go to when we end...

But if God is the flowers and the trees
And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,
Then I believe in him,
Then I believe in him all the time,
And my whole life is an oration and a mass,
And a communion with my eyes and through my ears.

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

Night doesn’t fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.

It’s an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it’s the soul
But it’s not the soul: it’s the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing.

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

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

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.
I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.
They’re things known from the outside.
But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.

Even so, I’m somebody.
I’m the Discoverer of Nature.
I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring a new Universe to the Universe
Because I bring the Universe to itself.

Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,
Even when there’s not a breeze at all, it seems
Like there’s a light breeze blowing for a minute
But the trees are unmoving
In every leaf of their leaves
And our feelings have had an illusion,
An illusion of what would please them...

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 wholeness
Is a sickness of our ideas.

I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.
My thought crosses the river I swim very slowly
Because the suit men made it wear weighs it down.

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 pass by and we forget;
And the sun is always punctual every day.

(5/7/14)

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

I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...
If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking.

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 pleasing
When you hold them in your hand
And look at them for a while.

And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,
And commerce, and the ships leaving
Their smoke on the high seas.
Because he knows all of this lacks the truth
A flower has in its blooming
And which moves with the sunlight
Changing the hills and valleys

That lady has a piano.
It’s nice, but it’s not the running of rivers
Or the murmuring trees make ..

Who needs a piano?
It’s better to have ears
And love Nature.

I’d like to have enough time and quiet
To think about absolutely nothing,
To not ever feel myself living,
To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.

I'm one of my sensations.

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 a trunk not having iron bands!

There being injustice is like there being death.

On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,
And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.
Each thing only reminds us of what it is
And it’s only what nothing else is.
The fact that it’s it separates it from every other thing.
(Everything’s nothing without another thing that’s not it).

Something changed in part of reality - my knees and my hands.
What science has knowledge for this?
The blind man goes on his way and I don’t make any more gestures.
It’s already not the same time, or the same people, or anything the same.
This is being real.

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