Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
Interpretation
Wasting time can have its own value and beauty.
This quote by Fernando Pessoa suggests that there is a unique beauty or aesthetic quality in moments of idleness or when time is spent without a purposeful agenda. Rather than viewing time wasted as entirely negative, it invites us to consider how leisurely moments can provide insight, creativity, and satisfaction that structured time may not offer.
In practice
During a speech on creativity, I would use this quote to emphasize the importance of leisure.
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 real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
'Cool' is detached and emotionally cool. My instinct is to battle anything that seems overly cool.
The future is uncertain but the end is always near.
When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities - locally, nationally and globally - that share the characteristics of all successful communities.
But shall we wear these glories for a day? Or shall they last, and we rejoice in them?
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