one of my favourites is in my signature. It's by a well-known portuguese author, Fernando Pessoa.
Here it is, roughly translated:
“What is another person like inside
Who will know how to dream it?
The soul of another is another universe
With which there is no communication possible
With which there is no true understanding
We know nothing of the soul
Except of our own
Those of others are gazes,
Are gestures, are words,
With the supposition of some similarity
at their depths”
Fernando Pessoa, 1934
__________________
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
Fernando Pessoa, 1918
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