Alberto Caeiro

“I pass and I stay, like the Universe.”

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

“What does this think about that? Nothing thinks about anything. Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants? If it did, it would be people. . . Why am I worrying about this? I...”

“If I die very young, hear this: I was never anything but a kid playing. I was a heathen like the sun and the water, I had the universal religion only people don’t have. I was happy because I...”

“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,...”

“A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales Acts like a sick god, but like a god. Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists, He knows things exist, that...”

“Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field There passes for a moment the figure of a man. His steps go with “him” in the same reality, But I look at him and them, and they...”

“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...”

“I was born subject like others to errors and defects, But never to the error of wanting to understand too much, Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect.. Never to...”

“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 repeat...”

“To love is to think. And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her. I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her. I have a great animat...”

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

“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.”

“I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing, And I look at flowers and I smile... I don’t know if they understand me Or if I understand them, But I know the tru...”

“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 suffer...”

“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 wh...”

“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. (6/20/1919)”

“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 ba...”

“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.”

“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...”