Alberto Caeiro Quotes - Page 2

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.
I’m a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

If I talk about her like she’s a being
It’s because talking about her I need to use the language of men
Which gives personality to things,
And imposes a name on things.

Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
A wind passes very lightly
And goes away, always very lightly.
And I don’t know what I think
And I don’t want to know.

Let’s be simple and calm,
Like brooks and trees,
And God will love us by making
Beautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,
And give us greenness in his spring,
And a river for us to go to when we end...

But if God is the flowers and the trees
And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,
Then I believe in him,
Then I believe in him all the time,
And my whole life is an oration and a mass,
And a communion with my eyes and through my ears.

Other times when I hear the wind blow
I feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.

Night doesn’t fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Beyond my thinking and having any thoughts
The night falls concretely
And the shining of stars exists like it had weight.

It’s an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it’s the soul
But it’s not the soul: it’s the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing.

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.
I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am.
I only regret not having loved you.
Put your hands in mine
And let’s be quiet, surrounded by life.

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.
I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.
They’re things known from the outside.
But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.

Even so, I’m somebody.
I’m the Discoverer of Nature.
I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring a new Universe to the Universe
Because I bring the Universe to itself.

Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,
Even when there’s not a breeze at all, it seems
Like there’s a light breeze blowing for a minute
But the trees are unmoving
In every leaf of their leaves
And our feelings have had an illusion,
An illusion of what would please them...

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 whole these belong to,
That a real and true wholeness
Is a sickness of our ideas.

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

A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;
And the road didn’t become more beautiful or even more ugly.
That’s human action on the outside world.
We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we pass by and we forget;
And the sun is always punctual every day.

(5/7/14)

The river of my village doesn’t make you think about anything.
When you’re at its bank you’re only at its bank.

I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...
If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking.

He’s taught me everything.
He taught me how to look at things.
He shows me everything there is in flowers.
He shows me how stones are pleasing
When you hold them in your hand
And look at them for a while.

And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,
And commerce, and the ships leaving
Their smoke on the high seas.
Because he knows all of this lacks the truth
A flower has in its blooming
And which moves with the sunlight
Changing the hills and valleys