My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
Interpretation
Dreams can provide a temporary escape, but they are insufficient to protect us from reality's harsh truths.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa suggests that while dreams may offer temporary solace or protection from life's challenges—much like an umbrella does during a storm—they ultimately lack the power to shield us from the more profound and often overwhelming aspects of reality. The metaphor of the 'thunderbolt' highlights the inevitability of confronting life's difficulties, making it clear that dreams, though comforting, are not an adequate defense against reality's trials.
In practice
In a presentation about the importance of confronting reality, I might use this quote to illustrate the futility of relying solely on dreams.
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.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.
The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.
War is the suicide of humanity because it kills the heart and kills love.
Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.
Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue
We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
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