Food For Thought

It is the duty of human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

[see also: HAPPINESS]

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness than happiness in the world.

When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.

No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

...technical advance could actually be an impediment to utopia: unlike in previous centuries, technology in the twentieth century has made necessity increase rather than diminish.

Humans had the tools necessary to make the earth all anyone could ever long for until the distant death of time from heat or cold. And only human nature stood in the way of near-perfection.