You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.
Yann MartelRead
I can well imagine an athiest's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores the contrast between faith and skepticism at the moment of death.
In this profound reflection by Yann Martel, the quote examines the contrasting mental states of an atheist and an agnostic when faced with death. The atheist experiences a sudden emotional outpouring of love and longing for a higher power, possibly indicating a fleeting moment of faith. In contrast, the agnostic, adhering to empirical reasoning, attempts to rationalize the experience through cold scientific explanations, ultimately missing the deeper emotional and imaginative aspects of existence. This serves as a commentary on how belief and skepticism shape our understanding of life and death.
Themes
FaithSkepticismImaginationExistenceTruth
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of belief.
More from Yann Martel
All quotes →Come aboard if your destination is oblivion- it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat if you want. But it's a sad view.
Yann MartelRead
Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
Yann MartelRead
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
Yann MartelRead
I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.
Yann MartelRead
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
Yann MartelRead
Similar quotes
We believe in separation of church and state, that there should be no unwarranted influence on the church or religion by the state, and vice versa.
Jimmy CarterRead
God has reserved to Himself the right to determine the end of life, because He alone knows the goal to which it is His will to lead it. It is for Him alone to justify a life or to cast it away.
Dietrich BonhoefferRead
What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt WhitmanRead
whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.
Ayn RandRead
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William JamesRead
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges BatailleRead