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.
Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not a negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them.
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.
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