Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of questioning established ideas and norms while simultaneously acknowledging the complexities of identity and belief.
Fernando Pessoa's quote encourages a critical approach to understanding life and our actions. It suggests that we should develop theories thoughtfully, while being aware of the contradictions in our choices and identities. By advocating for a reflective yet bold stance, the quote illustrates the tension between conformity and self-authenticity, highlighting the experimental nature of existence where one must navigate through beliefs and actions that may not align with one's true self.
In practice
In a discussion about self-identity during a psychology class.
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.
What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in his development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever he had to make an important decision.
When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.