We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on humanity's unattainable pursuit of perfection and the acceptance of our inherent imperfections.
Fernando Pessoa suggests that our admiration for perfection stems from its unattainability. If perfection were achievable, it would lose its allure and might even be rejected, as it does not align with our human nature, which is inherently flawed and imperfect. This highlights the value of embracing our imperfections as a crucial aspect of being human.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about embracing our flaws during a personal development workshop.
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.
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
It might be said that society speaks through the clothing it wears. Through its clothing it reveals its secret aspirations and uses it, at least in part, to build or destroy its future.
Good bye, proud world! I'm going home; Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.
I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind - qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.
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