It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that trying to find absolute order or meaning in the universe may be pointless, yet we continue to persevere despite this futility.
Philip K. Dick's quote highlights the existential struggle that individuals face when confronted with the vast, often chaotic nature of the universe. It expresses a sense of futility in seeking to impose order or meaning on life, recognizing that many aspects of existence may never fully add up or make sense. Nevertheless, the quote encourages resilience and a determination to forge ahead despite these uncertainties.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about embracing life's challenges without expecting clarity.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
Vast sections of the world's population are inspired by the same desires and live for common interests that bind them together far more than they separate them.
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity; sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.
Again, a law may be both constitutional and expedient, and yet may be administered in an unjust and unfair way.
When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.
There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.