Quotes About Relevance

the time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject. It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise.

If you don't pick your audience, you're lost because you're not really talking to anybody.

It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.

If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours.

The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

those photographs taken from lunar orbit, in which our planet looks more or less like any other planet (except to an astronomer): silent, revolving, beautiful, dead, irrelevant.

The past is the present's toy and plaything, gratifyingly unable to answer back.

Professional critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody is living in it rent free, but even so, surely it is, well, you know… time?

The names of the list mean something. Every one. They mean something to me. Everyone means something to someone.

My mother says that some books are good no matter when you read them, and some are good at a particular moment; they come into your life at just the right time.

When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today.

De rabbijnen wezen er graag op dat koning Salomo ter verklaring van elk vers van de Tora 3000 gelijkenissen gebruikte en dat hij van elke gelijkenis 1005 interpretaties kon geven. Dit betekende dat er 3 015 000 verklaringen waren voor elk stukje tekst. Een tekst die niet radicaal geherinterpreteerd kon worden om de actuele behoeften te bevredigen was dan ook dood.

Again, what works well in the spiritual domain can become destructive and even immoral if interpreted literally and practically in the mundane world. It

She told Rick, "The world stops for you when you're pretty. That's why women spend billions on crap for their faces. Their whole life, they're the center of attention. People want to be around them just because they're attractive. Their jokes are funnier. Their lives are better. And then suddenly, they get bags under their eyes or they put on a little weight and no one cares about them anymore. They cease to exist.

The world stops for you when you're pretty. That's why woman spend billions on crap for their faces. Their whole life, they're the center of attention. People want to be around them just because they are attractive. Their jokes are funnier. Their lives are better. And then suddenly, they get bags under their eyes or they put on a little weight and no one cares about them anymore. They cease to exist.

UNSETTLED QUESTIONS FOR THEOLOGY TODAY (1920)

The area of the Church stands in the world, as outwardly the Church stands in the village or in a city, beside the school, the cinema and the railway station. The Church's language cannot aim at being an end in itself. It must be made clear that the Church exists for the sake of the world, that the light is shining in the darkness.

I bought an Apple iPad and it was out of date sooner than a real apple would have been. We

Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

Men's actions to futurity appear but as the events to which they are conjoined do give them consequence.

It is natural to man to regard himself as the object of the creation, and to think of all things in relation to himself, and the degree in which they can serve and be useful to him.

If you want to interpret well and confidently, set Christ before you, for He is the man to whom it all applies, every bit of it.

The smallest pebble in the well of truth has its peculiar meaning, and will stand when man's best monuments have passed away.