The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Interpretation
Understanding the universe requires deciphering its hidden truths.
Peter De Vries' quote compares the universe to a safe that contains a combination needed to unlock its secrets. This suggests that while the universe holds profound knowledge and truths, accessing it requires effort, intelligence, and perhaps a bit of luck to discover the right understanding or perspective that will unlock these mysteries.
In practice
In a lecture about philosophy, one might say this quote to illustrate the complexities of understanding existence.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.
After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure.
It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.
If the whole earth is infinitely small in comparison with the sphere of the stars, what is man compared with all these created beings!
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