Paul Kurtz Quotes

Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.

Paul Kurtz

• Universe
• Meaning
• Temptation

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Quotes to Explore

• I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

  

  Laura Marling
  • Life
  • Country
  • Book

• I was very clear that I wanted to keep 'Thor' out of the rest of the Marvel universe for no less than the first six issues. And the success of the book, I think, speaks well to that decision.

  

  J. Michael Straczynski
  • Book
  • Success
  • Universe

• Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

  

  Galileo Galilei
  • Book
  • Universe
  • Language

• There's an entire universe in every single tweet, and it all really depends on the content as far as how it's going to spread.

  

  Jack Dorsey
  • Single
  • Universe
  • Content

• The All-Wise Maker attaches hundreds of instances of wisdom to each of the beings in the palace of the universe and equips them to perform hundreds of duties. To all trees He bestows instances of wisdom to the number of its fruits and gives duties to the number of its flowers.

  

  Said Nursi
  • Universe
  • Wisdom
  • Wise

• Tagliatelle comes from the word tagliare, meaning 'to cut.' Tagliolini are simply thinly cut tagliatelle.

  

  Yotam Ottolenghi
  • Word
  • Meaning
  • Cut

• A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

  

  Wallace Stevens
  • Nature
  • Need
  • Meaning

• In the alternate universe of conservative talk radio, the killing of Bin Laden coincidentally happened on Barack Obama's watch. He had to be kicked dragging and screaming into authorizing it, and even then he made lots of mistakes.

  

  Jackson Katz
  • Universe
  • Mistakes
  • Radio

• We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

  

  Barry Lopez
  • Universe
  • Courage
  • Admit

• For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

  

  Carl Sagan
  • Me
  • Universe
  • Better

• There's no meaning to life without music. Everybody has their own connect with music.

  

  Kailash Kher
  • Life
  • Music
  • Meaning

• It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure the agency's divorce rate is rather high.

  

  Valerie Plame
  • World
  • Why
  • High

• Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism as this?

  

  Abraham Lincoln
  • Great
  • God
  • Long

• There are so many elements flying in so many different directions that you really have to go with what feels like instinctively. The nature of the universe is fairly whimsical and nonsensical. In the most somber, beatific peacefulness there's complete chaos and maniacal laughter. I think music that doesn't reflect that is boring.

  

  Beck
  • Music
  • Different
  • Nature

• The conventional Big Bang theory says nothing about where all the matter came from. The theory really assumes that for every particle that we see in the universe today, there was, at the very beginning, at least some precursor particle, if not the same particle, with no explanation of where all those particles came from.

  

  Alan Guth
  • Today
  • Universe
  • Beginning

• I said it's a cold universe and I don't mean that metaphorically. If you go out into space, it's cold. It's really cold and we don't know what's up there. We happen to be in this little pocket where there's a sun. What have we got except love and each other to guard against all that isolation and loneliness?

  

  David Chase
  • Up
  • Space
  • Universe

• Being poor sucks... It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month.

  

  Antony Garrett Lisi
  • Trying
  • Universe
  • Sleep

• It would seem staggeringly arrogant to think we were the only ones in the universe, but at the same time, I don't know if contact has been made yet or not because you think something like that would be hard to cover up. I'm still on the fence. I keep an open mind about all of these things.

  

  Dean Haglund
  • Up
  • Time
  • Mind

• I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: 'Oh my God, what a blessing.' Then you realise it's important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

  

  Paulo Coelho
  • God
  • Important
  • Country

• My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.

  

  Brian Greene
  • School
  • High
  • Today

• I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

  

  A. S. Byatt
  • Universe
  • Christian
  • Worry

• I'm a good man, and I'm gonna become a better man.

  

  Chance The Rapper
  • Good

• Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.

  

  Paul Kurtz
  • Universe
  • Meaning
  • Temptation