There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Interpretation
Life is inherently filled with pain, and no matter where we go, we cannot escape this reality.
Fernando Pessoa's quote suggests that throughout life, we are all on a journey, akin to ships sailing toward various destinations. Despite our desire to seek comfort and evade suffering, the truth remains that pain is an unavoidable aspect of human existence, and no port we reach can promise an absence of it.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of life and suffering.
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.
Of all the grief's that harass the distressed; sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.
He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
The vegetarian movement ought to fill with gladness the souls of those who have at heart the realization of God's kingdom upon earth, not because vegetarianism itself is such an important step towards the realization of this kingdom (all real steps are equally important or unimportant), but because it serves as a criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of man is genuine and sincere.
If you look at all the notions we accept about who we are, you find that they are all based upon our perceptual experiences.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil
We talk about heaven being so far away. It is within speaking distance to those who belong there. Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.