Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus HeaneyRead
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects a longing for spirituality despite recognizing the absence of traditional beliefs in an afterlife or a personal deity.
In this quote, Seamus Heaney expresses a deep yearning for a spiritual or transcendent experience that goes beyond the physical realm. Despite this desire, he confronts the reality of a world without the assurances of Heaven, an afterlife, or a personal God, suggesting a tension between human longing for the divine and the existential conditions of life where those beliefs may not hold true.
Themes
SpiritualityExistentialismLongingRealityBeliefs
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on spirituality, one could use this quote to highlight the conflict between desire for faith and the lack of evidence for it.
More from Seamus Heaney
All quotes →What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
Seamus HeaneyRead
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
Seamus HeaneyRead
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
Seamus HeaneyRead
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
Seamus HeaneyRead
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
Seamus HeaneyRead
Similar quotes
It's here, where absolute evil was perpetrated, that the will must resurface for a fraternal world, a world based on respect of man and his dignity.
Simone VeilRead
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
Boris PasternakRead
Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.
Madeleine L'EngleRead
But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.
Isabelle EberhardtRead
What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
AristotleRead
Religion is a superstition that originated in man`s mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an orgainized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.
Emma GoldmanRead