You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of expansive thinking during moments of awe and wonder.
Yann Martel's quote highlights the transformative power of moments that inspire us, suggesting that when we are in a state of wonder, we are more capable of transcending ordinary thoughts. It encourages us to embrace a broader perspective that encompasses both profound and subtle experiences, allowing for a richer understanding of the universe and our place within it.
In practice
This quote can be used during a speech about creativity in education.
You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Come aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it's a sad view.
Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.
It is a very good world to live in, To lend or to spend, or to live in; but to beg or to borrow, or to get a man's own, It is the very worst world that ever was known.
A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world: if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public.
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