“There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.”

— E.M. Forster , book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 2

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E.M. Forster 200

English novelist 1879–1970

- Goa

“There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”

Carl Sagan book The Demon-Haunted World

Source: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

“Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.”

Claire Messud (1966) American writer

Source: The Woman Upstairs

“Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.