It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the natural human tendency to feel disappointment, likening it to childish behavior that persists into adulthood.
Isaac Asimov highlights the idea that disappointment is a universal emotion that can affect people of all ages, suggesting that even adults experience feelings often associated with children. This commentary serves to remind us that emotional responses can be a fundamental part of being human, regardless of our maturity or age.
In practice
In a speech about embracing our emotions, this quote could serve as a reminder that it's natural to feel disappointment.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.
God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.
Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.
Gradually I came to realize that the process of saving the desert of the human heart and revegetating the actual desert is actually the same thing.
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