“Where should I go?" -Alice. "That depends on where you want to end up." - The Cheshire Cat.”
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
“Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.”
Religion without Revelation (1957) p. 58
Context: The supernatural is being swept out of the universe in the flood of new knowledge of what is natural. It will soon be as impossible for an intelligent, educated man or woman to believe in a god as it is now to believe the earth is flat, that flies can be spontaneously generated... or that death is always due to witchcraft... The god hypothesis is no longer of any pragmatic value for the interpretation or comprehension of nature, and indeed often stands in the way of better and truer interpretation. Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
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Julian Huxley38
English biologist, philosopher, author 1887–1975Related quotes
Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Variant: One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist
The Expanding Universe. (1933) Ch. IV The Universe and the Atom
“Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth.”
Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician
Isaac Barrow, Duty of Thanksgiving, Works, Volume I, p. 66; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 921-24
“Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?”
John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent
“The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin.”
Charles Sheffield book Summertide
Source: The Heritage Universe, Summertide (1990), Chapter 11, “Summertide Minus Thirteen” (p. 127)
Herta Müller book The Appointment
Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm translation, Picador 2002, p. 81
The Appointment (1997)
“I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.”
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet
"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1939)
“[…] faded smiles oft linger in the face,
While grief's first flakes fall silent on the head!”
Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet
Source: "Unseasonable Snows", line 13; p. 38, Lyrical Poems (1891)