Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.
Interpretation
Change can be beautiful and significant, even if it seems overwhelming.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke suggests that while gigantic changes or concepts may initially seem intimidating or daunting, they can ultimately reveal beauty and wonder. The mention of grandchildren hints at the evolution of perspectives across generations, implying that what might seem massive and overwhelming can also bring joy and admiration when viewed from a different angle.
In practice
A speaker at a family reunion might reference this quote while discussing how new technologies are transforming family interactions.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Black women's intersectional experiences of racism and sexism have been a central but forgotten dynamic in the unfolding of feminist and antiracist agendas.
Our Constitution does not profess to have been established simply by the majority, but by 'the people' - the minority as much as the majority.
Christ calls us to carry the Cross; churches call us to have fun in His name.
The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
I had been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a dome on it.
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.