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.
Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines, then my world changes.
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