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'.
The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time.
Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.
Truth, in the broadest sense, means being attuned with the real. To be authentically in touch with the true, and the good and the beautiful. Yes?
We always look at the 'Fortune 500,' and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
The way up and the way down are one and the same.
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