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.
...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent.
What should be the future of Israel? Is the land the most important choice, and for that reason to keep the whole of the land at any cost, or to have a partition and build the Jewish state on part of the land? And the other part?
Properly speaking, all true work is religion.
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
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