You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?
Interpretation
The quote suggests that individuals start without inherent beliefs and are influenced by external figures to adopt a religion or belief system.
Yann Martel's quote reflects on the nature of human belief, positing that people enter the world in a neutral state, akin to being in limbo, devoid of predetermined religious inclinations. It implies that religion is often introduced to individuals through external influences, such as family or societal figures, rather than being an innate aspect of their existence.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of faith and belief systems in a philosophy class.
You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it's a sad view.
Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
We lose many things simply out of our fear of losing them.
The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.
But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?
They whose guilt within their bosom lies, imagine every eye beholds their blame.
I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.
A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.
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