Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
Interpretation
Wasting time can have its own value and beauty.
This quote by Fernando Pessoa suggests that there is a unique beauty or aesthetic quality in moments of idleness or when time is spent without a purposeful agenda. Rather than viewing time wasted as entirely negative, it invites us to consider how leisurely moments can provide insight, creativity, and satisfaction that structured time may not offer.
In practice
During a speech on creativity, I would use this quote to emphasize the importance of leisure.
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.
On Sunday 8 April 1945, he had just finished conducting a service of worship at Schoenberg, when two soldiers came took him away. As he left, he said to another prisoner, This is the end - but for me, the beginning - of life. He was hanged the next day, less than a week before the Allies reached the camp.
Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world's greatest experts. They bested time like no one else.
What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.