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 first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.
No matter how big and powerful government gets, and the many services it provides, it can never take the place of volunteers.
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.
The accusation is always on the first page, and the retraction on page 19.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.