All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
Interpretation
Human plans are often disrupted by forces beyond our control, such as nature or fate.
This quote by Arthur C. Clarke highlights the unpredictability of life and the limitations of human agency. Despite our best efforts to plan and organize our lives, we must acknowledge that there are greater forces at play that can alter our course unexpectedly, reminding us to remain adaptable and open to change.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a discussion about unexpected life changes.
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'.
I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. ... It's irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space.
What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God's plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.
If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.
If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.
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