There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.
Interpretation
Achievement brings both joy and a sense of loss as it leads to new challenges.
Arthur C. Clarke highlights the bittersweet nature of achieving one's goals. While reaching a long-cherished dream is rewarding, it also brings an understanding that this accomplishment signifies the end of a chapter, propelling one to face new challenges and reshape their life towards future aspirations.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a graduation ceremony to highlight the bittersweet experience of completing an education.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.
To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. It also raises the vibrational frequency of the energy field that give life to the physical body.
Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
"The true essence of humankind is kindness. There are other qualities which come from education or knowledge, but it is essential, if one wishes to be a genuine human being and impart satisfying meaning to one's existence, to have a good heart."
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