meaning

"I cannot help you with your inability to find physical comfort—it is a problem of body chemistry," he says. "It poses interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies."

Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What's the rush? What you're talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That's what motivates you. You can't bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?"

"If the Universe is just a puzzle box, it doesn't mean a damn thing, does it? It's not enough. Not any more; maybe it never was." Rosenberg had reached a kind of ultimate logic, she thought. He must be spending his walking time addressing the final question science couldn't answer, in this godless age: Why bother to live at all?

Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.

What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. "There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."

The bad news is we don't have any control. The good news is you can't make any mistakes.

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,"

that's not what fly-bat-worm says," said Orolo. "It says only that pure thought alone doesn't enable us to draw any conclusions one way or another about things that are non-spatiotemporal—such as God."

"No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the cnoöns exist independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples' brains at any given moment," Paphlagon said. "It is a simple application of the Steelyard. What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras, different sub-disciplines, different cosmi even, time and time again prove the same results—results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof-chains—results, some of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of the physical universe? The simplest answer is that the cnoöns really exist, and are not of this causal domain."

"That's their problem," Arnold said. "We can't make them experience wonder."

Love, O Govinda, seems paramount to me. Seeing through the world, explaining it, despising it may be crucial to great thinkers. But all I care about is to be able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it or myself, to be able to view it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and awe.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

the more resolutely you plumb the question "Who or what am I?"—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else.

Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing.

In a high meadow, wild bighorn sheep. Their lambs gambol. When you see that gamboling with your own eyes, you'll know something you didn't know before. What will you know? Hard to say, but something like this: whether life means anything or not, joy is real. Life lives, life is living.

Anything you're ever proud of will be thrown away.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

"So it's false." "What isn't?" "Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling."

"Congratulations! A desire not to butt into other people's business is eighty percent of all human wisdom."

"The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."

Love is wonderful. It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement. Oh, trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and calculating and classifying love. It is a profound foolishness, a cosmic trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher—yes, and of the futurist. But when one forsakes such intellectual flesh-pots and becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover, then all he may do, and which is what he cannot help doing, is to yield to the compulsions of being and throw both his arms around love and hold it closer to him than is his own heart close to him. This is the summit of his life, and of man's life. Higher than this no man may rise. The philosophers toil and struggle on mole-hill peaks far below. He who has not loved has not tasted the ultimate sweet of living. I know.

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.

"The meaningless absurdity of life," wrote Leo Tolstoy, "is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."

The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.' "

Montag looked at the river. We'll go on the river. He looked at the old railroad tracks. Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to put things into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I'll get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

If spaceflight gives us nothing else than an awareness of our true nature, he thought, then that alone will justify its cost.

"Think of it this way," said Helmholtz. "Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it." A small cry of despair came from Jim Donnini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy. "How?" said Jim. "Love yourself," said Helmholtz, "and make your instrument sing about it. A-one, a-two, a-three." Down came his baton.

I understand that there must be great suffering before great joy.

Just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings, neither is there a strict hierarchy. Non-human entities do not exist merely to provide for the needs of man. Nor are they all-powerful gods who run the world as they wish. The world does not revolve around humans or around any other particular group of beings.

"Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?" "I don't know. Maybe. Yes." "Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be." "Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it."

Santichai and Melissa Supitayaporn were a pair of eighty-year-old earthborn missionaries from the Church of Humanity Ascendant, a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms, and whose theology boiled down to Humans can be better than they are, so let's do that.

Astra inclinant, sed non obligant;

Old-fashioned American optimism had been replaced by a despairing, self-absorbed worship of consumption. "Piling up material goods," Carter said, "cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no purpose or meaning."

Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?