"Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the 'wonders' of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Defendant
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Defendant
68 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Defendant →
Related Quotes
"At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth that th…"
"In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes that seem to contradict the idea that there i…"
"Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star up…"
"The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness t…"
"One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literatur…"
"But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind o…"
"Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of a…"
"But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous n…"
"Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial symbolism of all the colours and degrees of arist…"
"If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten the existence of this book—I do not speak in mod…"