I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for authenticity over being fully understood by others, suggesting that compromising oneself for understanding can diminish one's individuality.
Fernando Pessoa's quote highlights the complex relationship between self-perception and how we are perceived by others. It suggests that striving for understanding can lead to a loss of authenticity, as individuals may conform to others' expectations in order to be accepted. Instead, Pessoa advocates for embracing the mystery of one's self and maintaining respect for one's individuality, regardless of how one is misunderstood.
In practice
In a speech about individuality, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of remaining true to oneself.
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.
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.
What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.