Álvaro de Campos
Author
Quotes by Álvaro de Campos
-
in exceptional circumstances — exceptional in that all circumstances in life are exceptional, especially those which are nothing in themselves and come to be everything in their results.
Read quote -
It's stupid, but it's human, and that's how it is.
Read quote -
Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn't have limits. Existence means there's always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn't always being some other thing that's beyond it?"At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate."Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number — say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 — there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger...—"But that's just numbers," protested my master Caeiro. And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:—What is 34 in Reality, anyway?
Read quote -
Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.
Read quote -
the Great Vaccination — the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.
Read quote -
and the idea of nothingness — the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling — has, in my dear master's work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks.
Read quote -
But what you're calling poetry is what everything is. It's not even poetry — it's seeing. These materialists are blind. You told me they say space is infinite. Where do they see that in space?"And I, disconcerted: "But don't you think of space as infinite? Can't you conceive of space as infinite?—"I don't conceive of anything as being infinite. How could I conceive of anything as being infinite?""But, man," I said, "Imagine space. Beyond that space is more space, and beyond that more, and then more, and more... It never ends...""Why?" asked my master Caeiro.
Read quote