“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939

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“We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as:
Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?”

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 167
Context: We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as:
Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
Where did the laws of physics come from?
Why does the universe seem so strange?
My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted. They may be gleaned from existing faith traditions or from personal search. God may be apprehended as a remote Author without present-day agency, or as an interested Presence with whom one can form a relationship, or as pantheistic — Inherent in All Things.
The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no Beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the universe on — to ask Why Are Things As They Are? — is to generate the foundation for everything else.

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“Poland can have nothing to do with the restoration of the old Russia. Anything rather than that – even Bolshevism.”

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) Polish politician and Prime Minister

Joseph Pilsduski. Interview by Dymitr Merejkowsky, 1921. Translated from the Russian by Harriet E. Kennedy, B.A., London & Edinburgh, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., 1921. Quoted from this site http://members.lycos.co.uk/jozefpilsudski/dm.html.
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“Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Lesson, Stanza 1 (1899-1902).
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“God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Found in Pushkin's. The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories. English edition by Random House LLC. 2013. p. 139
As quoted by Joseph Frank in Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009). Princeton University Press, p. 203.

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