When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.
Interpretation
No matter how much we learn about the universe, the complexity of human emotions remains an unsolved mystery.
This quote by Stephen Fry suggests that even with all the knowledge we can gain about the universe and its workings, the intricacies of human emotions and the heart will always remain enigmatic. It highlights the contrast between the empirical knowledge of the external world and the profound internal experience of human feelings, which cannot be fully understood or explained.
In practice
During a lecture about the interplay of science and art, one could use this quote to illustrate the limits of rational understanding.
I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.
To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.
As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.
It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.
You can't just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.
Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.
Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.
Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
The true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators, but traditionalists.
The overwhelming condemnation makes it clear we have made enormous progress in teaching everyone that racism is bad. Where we seem to have dropped the ball... is in teaching people what racism actually is ... which allows people to say incredibly racist things while insisting they would never.
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