I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the innocence and purity associated with sleep, equating the act of killing a child with killing a sleeping person.
Fernando Pessoa's quote explores the surreal and innocent nature of sleep, suggesting that in slumber, we return to a childlike state devoid of guilt or wrongdoing. He provocatively posits that even the most egregious individuals are stripped of their malevolence while they sleep, blurring the moral lines between innocence and guilt, and offering a profound reflection on the nature of life, morality, and the human condition.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of morality and innocence.
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.
If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.
It can in no sense be said that heaven is outside of any one; it is within ... and a man, also, so far as he receives heaven, is a recipient, a heaven, and an angel.
Free speech not only lives, it rocks!
It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America's bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
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