Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
VoltaireRead
If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the belief in God is an inherent part of human nature and the order of the universe.
Voltaire's quote reflects on the necessity of the concept of God in human understanding and society. He articulates that even if God did not exist in reality, humanity would feel compelled to create this concept to make sense of the intelligence and order present in nature. The quote further emphasizes that the natural world reveals a higher power and intelligence, asserting humanity's reliance on this greater force.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion on the existence of God, this quote could serve to illustrate the human inclination towards belief.
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
At some point you have to stop acting as though life is happening to you and acknowledge the ways you are happening to it. Once you take responsibility for your side of the street, you grant yourself the power to improve every aspect of your life by simply acting and behaving differently.
Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.
Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.
Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.
One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
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