You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Embracing doubt prevents personal growth and progress, just as choosing to remain still hinders movement and exploration.
In this quote, Yann Martel suggests that choosing to live a life filled with doubt is as limiting as selecting immobility as a way to travel. Just as remaining stationary restricts movement and discovery, allowing doubt to dominate one's thoughts can stifle action, creativity, and growth. It encourages individuals to confront their uncertainties rather than succumb to them, fostering a more dynamic and fulfilling existence.
Themes
DoubtPhilosophyGrowthActionMobility
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles, this quote could inspire listeners to embrace action.
More from Yann Martel
All quotes βCome 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, thatβs their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
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Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
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If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
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Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures,-depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. 'T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.
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Humankind can't stand too much reality.
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The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
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