I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.
Interpretation
Embracing defeat as a form of success can lead to personal growth and insight.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa suggests that acknowledging one's defeats can be as significant as celebrating victories. By carrying the 'conscience of defeat' as a 'victory banner,' he indicates that the lessons learned from failures are valuable and contribute to a deeper understanding of oneself and life's challenges. Defeats, rather than being simply negative experiences, can be transformed into symbols of courage and resilience.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
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.
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.
Our flaws are what makes us human. If we can accept them as part of who we are, they really don't even have to be an issue.
Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.
Men do not mirror themselves in running water - they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.
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