I ran across these at the bottom of emails I was reading this morning and wanted to share:
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
Sometimes I think about this when I think of how we humans create our gods. Some are the ultimate in perfection and some have just about every human vice imaginable. The perfect ones are still responsible for an imperfect world. Perhaps believing that our gods are just as human as we are makes it easier to worship them. There’s a line from the Last Unicorn about how things that cannot die cannot really live. Perhaps that’s why our gods are imperfect: so that they can be real to us.
I learn that ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harnessing, disfiguring or totally destroying the other ninety percent?
-Annie Dillard, author (b. 1945)
This just reminds me of the Ten Things‘ naked cat.
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
-Alice Walker, author (b. 1944)
Ain’t that the truth…
All ideas are already in the brain, just as all statues are in the marble.
-Carlo Dossi, author and diplomat (1849-1910)
A little Socratic method to wrap it all up. Truth with a capital “t” is carried in our hearts. Sometimes all we need is a chisel. Sometimes we need dynamite. But it’s there, if we could only see it.
