QuoteProject
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!
Tennessee Williams
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

UnderstandingDivinityHuman ConditionExistencePhilosophy

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about spirituality, one could use this quote to illustrate the limitations of human understanding.

More from Tennessee Williams

Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Show me a person who hasn´t known any sorrow and I´ll show you a superficial.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
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.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
Tennessee WilliamsRead

Similar quotes

What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support, That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men. 1 Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 22.
John MiltonRead
Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life.
Ayn RandRead
We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however “humanely” we treat them.
Gary L. FrancioneRead
In these two things the greatness of man consists, to have God dwelling in us as to impart His character to us, and to have Him dwelling in us, that we recognize His presence, and know that we are His, and He is ours. The one is salvation; the other, the assurance of it.
Frederick William RobertsonRead
Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.
Isabel AllendeRead
In the past, it was possible to destroy a village, a town, a region, even a country. Now it is the whole planet that has come under threat. This fact should compel everyone to face a basic moral consideration; from now on, it is only through a conscious choice and then deliberate policy that humanity will survive.
Pope John Paul IiRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.