Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Book:
The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.
We look back upon history and what do we see, empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter- revolutions, wealth accumulated and wealth dispersed. Shakespeare has spoken of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon. I look back on my own fellow countryman in England, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world. Most of them convinced in the words of what is still a popular song, that the god who made them mighty shall make them mightier yet. I’ve heard of a craze-cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I’ve seen an Italian clown saying he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I’ve heard of a murderous Georgian in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as a wiser than Soloman, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than (any wise man). I have seen America wealthier, and in terms of military weapons, more powerful than the rest of the world put together. So had the American people so desired, they could have out done a Caesar or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquest. All in one life time - all in one life time - all gone - gone with the wind. England, part of a tiny island of the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he help found and dominate for some three decades. All in one life time, all gone with the wind. Behind the debris of our self-styled-soloman supermen, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have hope - - the person of Jesus Christ. (And I present him to you as the veritas, the Truth - - and it does matter because the truth does.)
Quoting: British Journalist, Malcom Muggeridge (1903 to 1990)
Quoting: British Journalist, Malcom Muggeridge (1903 to 1990)
Speech: The Harvard Veritas Forum (1992)
I am convinced, please listen my dear friend, in this great land (America) which is now my own, I am convinced, absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. And that’s why we are bankrupt of meaning in a land of so much.
Speech: The Harvard Veritas Forum (1992)
Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it.
Book: Confessions
Every beginning is mysterious because every beginning has a drop of the exotic perfume of divinity on its garments.
Book: A Companion to the Summa, Vol. I
Although there is a natural desire for sexual mating, there are also natural desires for conjugal love, parental care, familial bonding, and enduring friendship. Mr. Hefner might satisfy his desire for promiscuous mating, but his pleasure will be shallow and momentary. Marriage and family life promote our fullest happiness over a whole life. And that’s why the image of an 80-year-old Hefner surrounded by his bunnies evokes both disgust and pity among mature people. We know that such a life is deeply unsatisfying in its shallowness and thus bad because it’s undesirable for any sensible human being.
It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
I was fine when existence had no meaning. Meaninglessness in a universe that has no meaning — that I get. But meaninglessness in a universe with meaning? What does that mean?
TV: Wonderfalls
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Book: The Timeless Way of Building
The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view, it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain. How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity has the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by a performance of the Mass in B Minor, and on to the mystic’s encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the center of our encounter with reality, and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless.
Book: quoted in Dr. Francis Collins, The Language of God
To be flotsam and jetsam with alternating moments of delight and misery, to feel the passage of time and have no charge of it, no power save to say good-bye to part of oneself swept away with it, to be covered over with the scurvy of contemporary fashion and vice, this is the malaise of our day, the aftermath of unbelief.
Book: Death and Life
By treating all content as comparably valid…you get nowhere… Relativism is dangerous in quite particular ways: for the shape of human existence at an individual level and in society. The renunciation of truth does not heal man.
It is unthinkable that a search so deeply rooted in human nature would be completely vain and useless. The capacity to search for truth and to pose questions itself implies the rudiments of a response. Human beings would not even begin to search for something of which they knew nothing or for something which they thought was wholly beyond them. Only the sense that they can arrive at an answer leads them to take the first step.
Book: Fides et Ratio, 29.
How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
The nature of reality is this: It is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden.
I tore these out of your symbol and they turned into paper.
TV: Firefly
If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do, now, today. …If there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.
TV: Angel
I discovered that what’s really important for a creator isn’t what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what’s important is the way we say it.
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
If we wish to understand the nature of reality, we have an inner hidden advantage: we are ourselves a little portion of the universe and so carry the answer within us.
As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
Q: Some scientists say that removing religion or God from their life would leave it meaningless, that it’s God that gives meaning to life.
A: Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades—before we die forever—in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That’s the kind of privileged century in which we live. That’s what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it’s the only life I’ve got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.
A: Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades—before we die forever—in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That’s the kind of privileged century in which we live. That’s what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it’s the only life I’ve got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer to that would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be ‘No.’
The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.