Fernando Pessoa ⋅ Erostratus (S.D.)

© Shibata Zeshin 'Autumn Grasses in Moonlight'

"(...) we come ever to the central point of all triumph, be it against the adversity of circumstances or the inertia of the future: will, and will only, make us win. Will only will convert our casual thought into a system and thus give it a body; will, and will only, will lift our happy phrase into a doctrine of that happiness."

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"A strange sickness of the poverty of words comes over upon us when we hear music, whatever our thoughts may think of music as an art. And a curiously similar nausea of mere expression take us away, like a finer music, when we lift our eyes from the intellectual reality of the poet to the emotional mystery of the saint."

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"Not sincerity in the absolute, but some sort sincerity, is required in art, that it may be art. A man can write a good love sonnet in two conditions — because he is greatly in love, or because he is greatly in art. He must be sincere in the love or in the art; he cannot be great in either, or in anything, otherwise. He may burn inwardly, not thinking of the sonnet he is writing; he may burn outwardly, not thinking of the love he is figuring. But he must be on fire somewhere, Otherwise he will not cook the goose of his human inferiority".

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"(...) Art is the intellectualization of sensation through expression. The intellectualization is given in, by and through the expression itself. "

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