Florbela Espanca

Portugal
8 Dec 1894 // 8 Dec 1930
Poet

Quotes



I'm not like most of the people: excited to madness at the beginning of the affections and then, after a month, completely uninterested by them. I'm the opposite: time passes and affection grows, only dying when the ingratitude and wickedness kills them.

Correspondence (1916)
Life is just this: a chain of good and bad accidents, without chaining logic, or reason; we have to look at it face to face with courage and think, without fainting, that our time will come, that there will be a day where we will be able to sleep, not hearing, not seeing, and not understanding anything.

Correspondence (1926)
The only way in life for being happy, especially for human beings like you, of a great sensitivity, an extraordinary imagination, the only way is to build up a very sweet home, and full of light, where, away from the world, one can love, one can work, one can live.

Correspondence (1920)
Happiness in life is already something so strict and almost conventional that taking from life a minimal portion of that shining treasure, so coveted and so chimerical, is the greatest of human follies.

Correspondence (1920)
There are no eternal pains, and it is our miserable condition not to keep anything that time takes from us, that time destroys: neither the noblest pains, nor the biggest ones.

Correspondence (1926)
I have born sensitive and so I shall die, most likely... we are what we are and not what we would want to be; don�t you think? You have to accept me as I am, as only this way I may be loved.

Correspondence (1920)
My world is not like the world of other people, I want much more, I demand much more, there is inside me a thirst for the infinite, a constant anxiety that I do not even understand, because I am far from being a pessimist; first I am an exalted one, with an intense soul, violent, tormented, a soul that does not feel well where it is, that misses... I do not know what!

Correspondence (1930)
We love who we love and not who we want to love.

Correspondence (1920)
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays