Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of questioning established ideas and norms while simultaneously acknowledging the complexities of identity and belief.
Fernando Pessoa's quote encourages a critical approach to understanding life and our actions. It suggests that we should develop theories thoughtfully, while being aware of the contradictions in our choices and identities. By advocating for a reflective yet bold stance, the quote illustrates the tension between conformity and self-authenticity, highlighting the experimental nature of existence where one must navigate through beliefs and actions that may not align with one's true self.
In practice
In a discussion about self-identity during a psychology class.
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.
Men killing other men really is an extraordinary phenomenon. Why does it happen? And how long has it gone on? And have the motives changed?
We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.
Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strenght state; usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.
I tell people, and it's the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won't make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won't make you a servant of Christ.
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