Fernando Pessoa

Portugal
13 Jun 1888 // 30 Nov 1935
Poet

We Know the World is False

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie �
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words� sense from words � knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

Fernando Pessoa, in 'English Poetry - 35 sonnets'
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