We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of the present moment while questioning the validity of knowledge beyond it.
H. L. Mencken's quote suggests that the only certainty we have is our existence in the present moment, as everything beyond that is uncertain and potentially misleading. It critiques the value we place on accumulated knowledge and posits that true understanding can only be found in the here and now, highlighting a philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence and perception.
In practice
In a meditation workshop, a facilitator might use this quote to encourage participants to focus on their breath and the present moment.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.
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