To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Interpretation
The essence of life is found in the ability to express oneself and create meaning through writing and thought.
Fernando Pessoa emphasizes the importance of self-expression and the intellectual engagement that comes with it. In a world filled with superficial concerns and distractions, he suggests that the true value of existence lies in our ability to articulate our experiences and thoughts, allowing us to transcend the mundane and connect with deeper truths.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a writing workshop to inspire participants about the power of words.
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.
He who affirms that Christianity makes men miserable, is himself an utter stranger to it.
I don't believe in devils. Indifference and misunderstandings can create evil situations. Most of the time, people who appear to be evil are really victims of evil deeds.
And what is liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, or labor, or trade?
Whether we're Democrats or Republicans or independents, we have to learn to hang together or we're gonna hang separately.
Neoliberalism has left Britain's boss classes drunk on triumphalism, paying themselves record salaries and bonuses while their workers are imprisoned by poverty and insecurity. It was never going to last.
We hear much of Bolshevism, much of labor unrest; at times, we hear the word 'revolution.' But these are but contagious diseases in the body of civilization, and I believe that the antitoxins of good cheer, mutual confidence, fairness and justice will ultimately cure these ills and make the world healthy and strong again.
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