Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle.
Interpretation
Challenges can be transformed into opportunities with perseverance.
This quote by Fernando Pessoa suggests that obstacles or difficulties we encounter in life can be valuable resources in our journey. Instead of discarding these 'stones', the speaker chooses to collect them, implying that with time and effort, these challenges can be transformed into something magnificent β a castle, symbolizing success and achievement.
In practice
Use this quote in a motivational speech to inspire people facing adversity.
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.
With your desire defined, quietly go within and shut the door behind you. Lose yourself in your desire; feel yourself to be one with it; remain in this fixation until you have absorbed the life and name by claiming and feeling yourself to be and to have that which you desired. When you emerge from the hour of prayer you must do so conscious of being and possessing that which you heretofore desired.
If you can keep on trying after three failures in a given undertaking you may consider yourself a 'suspect' as a potential leader in your chosen occupation. If you can keep on trying after a dozen failures the seed of a genius is germinating within your soul.
Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal.
No great goal was ever easily achieved.
The GREATEST battle you wage against FAILURE occurs on the INSIDE, not the OUTSIDE.
Step by step walk the thousand-mile road.
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