To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
Bruce ChatwinRead
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects how unfulfilled lives can lead to unrealistic projections of existence in the afterlife.
Bruce Chatwin's quote suggests that those who lead inactive and complacent lives often project their missed opportunities onto the idea of an afterlife. The Ancient Egyptians, with their belief in an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds, exemplify this tendency, as they envision the journeys they neglected in life manifesting in the next world, highlighting a universal human longing for fulfillment and exploration.
Themes
AfterlifeJourneyUnfulfilledEgyptiansOpportunitiesProjection
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the meaning of life during a philosophy class.
More from Bruce Chatwin
All quotes →The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.
Bruce ChatwinRead
Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."
Bruce ChatwinRead
When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.
Bruce ChatwinRead
I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.
Bruce ChatwinRead
Similar quotes
Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God. It would make God smaller than he must be assumed. When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn't make exceptions. This is too human an idea. Humans do such things, but not God.
Max BornRead
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John UpdikeRead
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Lawrence DurrellRead
When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are.
Ayn RandRead
Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.
Kurt VonnegutRead
Government can run and fund programs, but it can't love, it can't show compassion, and it can't embrace. Our faith is designed to have social implications, not just heavenly ones. The spiritual and the social must be connected.
Tony EvansRead