If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the contrast between reality and dreams, suggesting that true understanding comes from engaging with one's imagination.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa explores the nature of consciousness and reality. He presents the idea that merely being awake and perceiving the world is insufficient; instead, one must also embrace their dreams and imagination to find deeper truths. The 'bright, great sleep of things' signifies the superficiality of reality, whereas the 'rarer potion' of dreams highlights the value of internal exploration and the pursuit of profound understanding beyond the mundane.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion about the importance of creativity in personal development.
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.
Do you not yet understand what has made woman what she is? Then see what the sickly taste and perverted judgment of man now admires in woman.
Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.
The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social and emotional life. The great apes are therefore an ideal case for showing the arbitrariness of the species boundary. If we think that all human beings, irrespective of age or mental capacity, have some basic rights, how can we deny that the great apes, who surpass some humans in their capacities, also have these rights?
As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.
I would rather be ignorant than knowledgeable of evils.
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