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
All experience and phenomena are understood to be a dream, this should not be just an intellectual understanding, but a vivid and lucid experience...Genuine integration of this point produces a profound change in the individual's response to the world. Grasping and aversion is greatly diminished, and the emotional tangles that once seemed so compelling are experienced as the tug of dream stories, and no more.
Tenzin Wangyal RinpocheRead
It’s like losing gravity and falling into space – the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars.
Laini TaylorRead
The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
Max HorkheimerRead
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
Tony BlairRead
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
Doris LessingRead