Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!
Interpretation
This quote suggests that humans are attempting to understand the divine using our limited and flawed understanding.
Tennessee Williams' quote reflects on the human condition and our quest for meaning and understanding in a potentially incomprehensible universe. It likens our efforts to grasp the complexities of existence and divinity to children in a kindergarten, suggesting that our limitations and misunderstandings prevent us from fully appreciating the true nature of reality and the divine, as we try to convey profound ideas using inadequate tools.
In practice
In a speech about spirituality, one could use this quote to illustrate the limitations of human understanding.
Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die — with my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch.
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.
We not only live among men, but there are airy hosts, blessed spectators, sympathetic lookers-on, that see and know and appreciate our thoughts and feelings and acts.
We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.
Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.
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