I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Interpretation
Life is a temporary stay, and the end is uncertain.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa metaphorically describes life as an inn, suggesting that we are merely temporary guests in this world. The 'abyss coach' symbolizes death and the inevitable journey beyond life, highlighting the uncertainty and mystery of what lies ahead after our time here is over.
In practice
In a speech about the transient nature of life, this quote could be used to illustrate our temporary existence.
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.
When you feel confused or burdened by problems focus on THIS INSTANT and ask yourself: WHAT PROBLEM DO I HAVE RIGHT NOW? You will find that there is no problem NOW. A challenge that requires action, possibly, but not a problem.
Suffering is part of the human condition, and it comes to us all. The key is how we react to it, either turning away from God in anger and bitterness or growing closer to Him in trust and confidence.
A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
Sheβs the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.
The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.
The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial. It is the institution of private property that protects and implements the right to disagree - and thus keeps the road open to man's most valuable attribute: the creative mind.
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