The unbeliever imagines that religion pretends to offer answers, while the believer knows that the only promise it makes is to multiply questions.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the difference in perspective between believers and unbelievers regarding religion and its purpose.
Nicolas Gomez Davila's quote suggests that while unbelievers perceive religion as a system that provides definitive answers to life's mysteries, believers understand that religion's true essence lies in provoking deeper inquiries. It implies that rather than settling for absolutes, religion encourages exploration and contemplation of profound questions about existence, meaning, and spirituality.
In practice
In a debate on the nature of faith, you might quote this to illustrate differing views on the purpose of religion.
Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.
No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.
He was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland, that everytime you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them of vindictively as fast as possible.
In saving Tibet, you save the possibility that we are all brothers, sisters.
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