A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Interpretation
True faith must withstand scrutiny; otherwise, it is not valuable.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote emphasizes that genuine faith is tested by the challenges and truths of reality. If a belief cannot endure confrontation with facts or opposing views, then it lacks substantial worth and may ultimately lead to regrets for those who hold onto it.
In practice
In a discussion about personal beliefs during a philosophy class.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didnβt know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where weβre helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.
Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.
Because men believe not in Providence, therefore they do so greedily scrape and hoard. They do not believe in any reward for charity, therefore they will part with nothing.
In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.
We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.
If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.
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