Creating some god for one's inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if did not.
Interpretation
Attributing success to a higher power can shield individuals from pride and prevent them from taking blame for failures.
This quote by Margaret Atwood suggests that people often create deities or external forces to attribute their successes and failures to. By doing this, they protect themselves from the negative consequences of pride when they succeed, and they escape the blame when things do not go as planned, highlighting a common human tendency to externalize responsibility.
In practice
During a motivational speech about teamwork, one might quote Atwood to illustrate how we often hide behind external factors to justify our actions.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Upon the first goblet he read this inscription, monkey wine; upon the second, lion wine; upon the third, sheep wine; upon the fourth, swine wine. These four inscriptions expressed the four descending degrees of drunkenness: the first, that which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which stupefies; finally the last, that which brutalizes.
Gratitude opens your heart, and opening your heart is a wonderful and easy way for God to slip in.
The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.
In the end, The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go
There's small choice in rotten apples.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.