Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.
Interpretation
The quote expresses skepticism about the depth of friendship, suggesting that acquaintances may only feel a superficial concern.
Fernando Pessoa reflects on the nature of friendship, implying that what we often call friends are, in reality, merely acquaintances who may feel a fleeting sense of pity rather than genuine care. He questions the authenticity of these relationships, suggesting that true friends are rare, and that many people only express concern in response to dramatic events rather than through everyday support and connection.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of friendships at a social gathering.
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
Where are you heading, if you’ve got the choice?” James lifted an invisible sword. “‘Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!’ Like my dad.” Snape made a small, disparaging noise. James turned on him. “Got a problem with that?” “No,” said Snape, though his slight sneer said otherwise. “If you’d rather be brawny than brainy —” “Where’re you hoping to go, seeing as you’re neither?” interjected Sirius.
A good friend and a bad friend are like a perfume-seller and a blacksmith: The perfume-seller might give you some perfume as a gift, or you might buy some from him, or at least you might smell its fragrance. As for the blacksmith, he might singe your clothes, and at the very least you will breathe in the fumes of the furnace.
Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.
The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.
In our friendships we have to be wise that we choose godly people to be our friends. Somebody might say, well does that mean that you should never have a lost person as your friend? No, I wouldn't say that. But you can't have the same intimacy with a lost person that you can with a godly person in whom the Holy Spirit is living.
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