It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the value of personal narratives and the investigation of human emotions and motives.
Isaac Asimov highlights the importance of storytelling and the exploration of the complexities of human nature. He suggests that understanding the intricate dynamics of motives and emotions within personal or fictional narratives can provide deep insights into the human experience, making it a significant area of interest.
In practice
In a writing workshop, one might quote this to emphasize the significance of character development.
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.
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
The things I feared were not in the sky, but in the nature and in the touch of humanity. The cruelty of children . . . the blindness of the unpitiful - these were my terrors. But not the crash of thunder overhead, not the bolts of fire from the clouds.
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
If nationalism makes us poor, weak, and morally insecure, how can it claim to be patriotic? I maintain that nationalists are unpatriotic.
It is quite clear that beauty does depend on one's culture and upbringing for certain kinds of beauty, pictures, literature, poetry and so on...But mathematical beauty is of a rather different kind. I should say perhaps it is of a completely different kind and transcends these personal factors. It is the same in all countries and at all periods of time.
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