“I don’t want to be the one who says life is beautiful. I want to be the one who feels it.”

“Nurturing a feeling makes it proliferate. Choose wisely. Joy, kindness, love, & caring will illuminate your life.”

“Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.”

“The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists.”

“he woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out, not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to lose its ignorance.I’m perfectly aware no one’s obliged to reciprocate love, and great poets have nothing to do with being great lovers. But there’s a transcendent spite…Let her remain anonymous even to God!”

“Take lightly what you hear about individuals. We need not distort trust for our paltry little political agendas. We tend to trust soulless, carried information more than we trust soulful human beings; but really most people aren’t so bad once you sit down and have an honest, one-on-one conversation with them, once, with an open heart, you listen to their explanations as to why they act the way they act, or say what they say, or do what they do.”

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

“Life is so beautiful and so short that anything that makes me feel less than too much is nothing at all.”

“A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy talesActs like a sick god, but like a god.Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists,He knows things exist, that he exists,He knows existing exists and doesn’t explain itself,And he knows there’s no reason at all for anything to exist.He knows being is the point.All he doesn’t know is that thought isn’t the point.(10/1/1917)”

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

“She’s a manner of speaking.Even the flowers don’t come back, or the green leaves.There are new flowers, new green leaves.There are other beautiful days.Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real.”

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

“Night doesn’t fall for my eyesBut my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.Beyond my thinking and having any thoughtsThe night falls concretelyAnd the shining of stars exists like it had weight.”

“Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”