That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of thought and the tendency of the mind to dwell on unresolved questions.
Arthur C. Clarke compares the relentless nature of human thought to a tongue repetitively probing a broken tooth, illustrating how we often fixate on questions or ideas that are ultimately beyond our understanding. This metaphor highlights the futility of searching for answers to certain questions while simultaneously acknowledging the deep-seated curiosity that drives this mental exploration.
In practice
In a discussion about life's mysteries, one might say, 'As Clarke said, that's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly.'
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'.
Mari remembered what she had read in the young girl's eyes the moment she had come into the refectory: fear. Fear. Veronika might feel insecurity, shyness, shame, constraint, but why fear? That was only justifiable when confronted by a real threat: ferocious animals, armed attackers, earthquakes, but not a group of people gathered together in a refectory. But human beings are like that,' she thought. 'We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to 'build nations.' And when we cannot be sure how to improve the world, hubristic visions pose a grave danger.
We need a right view of the cross. It is both a historical event that can take us to Heaven and a current event that can bring Heaven to bear on Earth.
The land on which the cattle grazed was communal property. It was owned by no one. It was nobody's private farm. It was the common property of the people, shared by the people. So the practice of sharing was central to the concept of ownership of property.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.