When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the deeper emotional and existential causes behind seemingly trivial events.
Fernando Pessoa's quote invites us to explore the intricate relationships between our emotional state and the physical world around us. He uses the metaphor of a broken teacup to suggest that the mishap is not merely a result of carelessness but rather a manifestation of the anxieties and existential struggles that dwell within us, hinting at a connection between our inner turmoil and the outer realities we experience.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the impact of emotional health on our daily lives.
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.
Prayer is the vital breath of the Christian; not the thing that makes him alive, but the evidence that he is alive.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
'Melancholy' is prettier than 'depression'; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.
Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out.
If there is hope, it lies in the proles.
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