The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the pain of yearning for the unattainable and feeling dissatisfaction with reality.
Fernando Pessoa's quote delves into the complexity of human emotions, particularly the anguish that arises from longing for things that are impossible or never were. He suggests that such feelings, including nostalgia and regret, create a persistent inner turmoil that colors our perception of life, resulting in an unending struggle between what is and what could be.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of regret during a therapy session.
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.
He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.
That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.
The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.
Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.
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