Todd May > Quotes

“The fact that we die is what makes what we do and who we do it with matter.”
― Todd May, Death

“I would like to make a bold claim right here at the outset: the fact that we die is the most important fact about us. There is nothing that has more weight in our lives.”
― Todd May, Death

“I am like a wave on the sea. While the wave rises I appear to have some independent existence. However, I am just a movement of the sea, and my death is nothing but a crashing of water into water. My truth is that I am of the sea, and as a wave I appear independent of it only for a moment.”
― Todd May, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability

“For a human life to be meaningful, it must be one in which I am not a spectator but a real participant, and a participant in something that matters to me. [...] For my life to be meaningful, those projects have to feel like _my_ projects: not in the sense that I own them, but more in the sense that they own me, that they have captured my focus.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“My children will suffer in ways I fear I can foresee but am hopeless to prevent.”
― Todd May, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability

“Is there some reason for my being here except to live out my allotted time, to burn my days alongside others who are, in turn, burning theirs?”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“از یک سو برای بسیاری از بیخداهای پروپاقرص، شرطبندی بلز پاسکال شرطبندی بدی نیست. پاسکال فیلسوف فرانسوی بود که میگفت باید طوری عمل کنیم که انگار خدا وجود دارد، زیرا اگر خدا وجود نداشته باشد با این کار چیزی از دست نیمدهیم اما اگر خدا وجود داشته باشد، با بی‌اعتقادی به او خیلی ضرر میکنیم.”
― Todd May, Death

“The absurd itself is something very precise. It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“for Aristotle contemplation is the highest good that a life can achieve. It is the good he associates with the gods.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“In 1998, the New York Times reported that “in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy.”4”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“We are all born to no point, live out our days as best we can, and are then dissolved into the earth.”
― Todd May, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability

“Death is the ultimate source of both the tragedy and the beauty of a human life. Moreover, death's tragedy is the source of life's beauty and vice versa. Although it is better that we are mortal, it is nevertheless a shame that we have to die. To die brings to a pointless end the involvements that make up our lives. And yet without that pointless end those involvements themselves might have no point. They would only be part of the endless passing show. They would be unable to touch us. That is to say, without the beauty of the moments that we are granted in this life, our death would be no tragedy; and without the tragedy of death, those moments would have no beauty. In this sense, as in the other senses we have discussed, death is the deepest and most important fact about us. To be human is to die and, more importantly, to know that one will die throughout one's life, even when (or especially when) we go to great lengths to avoid that knowledge.”
― Todd May , Death

“The best way to treat the watch, then, is to wear it.”
― Todd May, Death

“...narrative therapy says that who we are is largely a product of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. [...] In other words, our narratives about ourselves don't merely reflect who we are: they help produce who we are.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“Thomas Kuhn, who once said that he came to realize that he did not understand a thinker until he could see the world through that thinker’s eyes.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“In 1998, the New York Times reported that “in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“همه ما بالاخره یک روز آینده‌ای را که برای خودمان در ذهن ترسیم کرده بودیم، رها می کنیم: نمی‌توانیم همزمان دو مسیر حرف‌ای متمایز را دنبال کنیم؛ بالاخره مجبوریم نانی سر سفره‌مان بیاوریم؛ خیلی از ما در مسیری می‌افتیم که پیش‌بینی نمی‌کردیم.”
― Todd May, Death