My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the conflict between one's higher self and lower impulses.
Kurt Vonnegut's quote expresses the struggle between one's moral conscious ('soul') and the base instincts and actions ('meat') that often go against it. It highlights the awareness of wrongdoing and embarrassment felt by one's inner self while simultaneously acknowledging the persistence of less rational behaviors despite that awareness.
In practice
In a discussion on moral choices, this quote can emphasize the struggle humans face between right and wrong.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must.
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
Where there is nothing, there is God.
People who carry in their hearts a strong conviction concerning the living reality of the Almighty and their accountability to Him for what they do with their lives are far less likely to become enmeshed in problems that inevitably weaken society.
Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them β acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.
I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.
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