Quotes About Relevance

I am continually pleasantly surprised by how many people are showing up at shows and are younger than our first record.

For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.

Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people, and 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer.

Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.

Last words and last thoughts are not invariably those most replete with human wisdom. If this seems to be the case, it is because unmemorable ones are not remembered.

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

His relevance derives overwhelmingly from the questions he asked and from his insistence that they cannot be easily dispensed with in the ways that people often think. One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.

On ne sait jamais rien. Sauf ce qui est sans importance.

They used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense.

As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus's arrest, trial, and execution was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was Christology, not history.

to remove a book from the period of its birth is like lifting a stone from a stream and watching it lose its luster in the palm of your hand.

Ask yourself this question: 'Will this matter a year from now?

Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.

It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.

It is a commonplace that good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own.

Le fait qu'un croyant est plus heureux qu'un sceptique n'est pas plus pertinent que le fait qu'un homme ivre est plus heureux qu'un homme sobre ».

Books have a way of finding their way into our lives, usually, right when we need them the most.

One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.

One man's feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.

Ulysses'. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.

Trecutul nu este soarta ta, singura iti faci viata, ca atunci cand conduci masina, fie incet, neriscand nimic, necastigand nimic, fie repede, cand tot ceea ce conteaza e ce ai in fata, in clipa asta, iar tot ce e in spate nu mai are relevanta.

If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.

Moral: to the extent you can choose, work on problems you think will be important.