There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that societal norms are arbitrary and that each individual is unique.
Fernando Pessoa's quote suggests that the concept of norms is a social construct, implying that what we consider to be rules or standards are merely illusions. It encourages us to recognize and celebrate individuality, asserting that every person is an exception in their own right, free from the confines of imposed expectations.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing our unique qualities.
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.
From a Buddhist point of view, emotions are not real. As an actor, I manufacture emotions. They're a sense of play. But real life is the same. We're just not aware of it.
My feminism does not demand that a woman have an equal opportunity to torture, alongside men. Torture is no less wrong because a woman, not a man, carries it out.
Scandal sells books; fidelity does not.
There is an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny.
People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."
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