People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the futility of aspiring for great achievements without understanding the inherent absurdity of life.
Muriel Barbery's quote suggests that humans often set lofty goals or ambitions, likening these aspirations to aiming for the stars. However, the outcome can be disappointing, similar to goldfish confined to a bowl. Barbery contemplates whether it would be more beneficial to teach children about the absurdities of life from the beginning, which may help them navigate their expectations and the inherent limitations of existence.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about how societal pressures shape personal goals.
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become...will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'?
Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature...yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!
Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.
...But listen, there will be more joy in heaven over the tears of a repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men.
First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
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