All is worthwhile if the soul is not small.
Interpretation
Having a grand perspective makes life's experiences valuable.
This quote by Fernando Pessoa emphasizes the importance of having a broad and open-minded outlook. A 'small soul' reflects narrow thinking or limited experiences, while a larger soul appreciates the richness and complexity of life, making every moment and experience worthwhile.
In practice
During a motivational speech, to encourage people to embrace challenges with a greater perspective.
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.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.
Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.
An inch of time on the sundial is worth more than a foot of jade.
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
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