One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.
Louis Antoine De Saint-JustRead
It's ironic that in our culture everyone's biggest complaint is about not having enough time; yet nothing terrifies us more than the thought of eternity.
Interpretation
People often express a lack of time in their lives, yet the idea of eternity can provoke fear.
This quote highlights the irony in human nature: while we constantly bemoan our busy lives and the shortage of time, the concept of eternity, which signifies an endless stretch of time, is often met with dread. It suggests that while we crave more time to achieve and experience, the thought of infinite existence unnerves us, revealing a deeper discomfort with the nature of time and existence itself.
In practice
During a discussion about work-life balance, one could mention this quote to emphasize our paradoxical feelings about time.
One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
.. that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.
The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there's some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn't made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we're working on something unfalsifiable.
We create our fate every day . . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.