Fernando Pessoa Quote
Beyond the bend in the roadThere may be a well, and there may be a castle,And there may be just more road.I don’t know and don’t ask.As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bendI look only at the road before the bend,Because the road before the bend is all I can see.It would do me no good to look anywhere elseOr at what I can’t see.Let’s pay attention only to where we are.There’s only enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.If there are people beyond the bend in the road,Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.That, for them, is the road.If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.For now we know only that we’re not there.Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bendThere’s the road without any bend.
Beyond the bend in the roadThere may be a well, and there may be a castle,And there may be just more road.I don’t know and don’t ask.As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bendI look only at the road before the bend,Because the road before the bend is all I can see.It would do me no good to look anywhere elseOr at what I can’t see.Let’s pay attention only to where we are.There’s only enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.If there are people beyond the bend in the road,Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.That, for them, is the road.If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.For now we know only that we’re not there.Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bendThere’s the road without any bend.
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About Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that this did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.