“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
―
―
“Religion, like art, is an attempt to deal with the non-rational. That's not irrational. Non-rational. Those powerful forces that inform all of our lives. Love, beauty, the search for meaning, our mortality, grief, alienation, these cannot be empirically measured. It's why Freud said he could never finally write about love. He could write about sex, but he couldn't write about love and religious systems are human creations. God is a human concept. All religious systems are flawed. All of them are finite attempts to deal with the infinite. To deal with those transcendent forces and the need the human beings have for the sacred. And I think art and early religious life, art and religion were not divorced. I think art itself is a religious ritual, certainly an important ritual, and what art and religion are trying to do is acknowledge, preserve, and to a certain extent, explain these forces that make up a complete human being. And I think that is probably one of the great failings of the new atheists and that they don't distinguish between the non-rational and the irrational.”
―
―
“Try to imagine being a destitute beet farmer in 1700. All of your life you hear only the birds in the sky, the sounds of hammers on wood and iron, and shovels digging in fields. The closest thing to music you get is a rowdy chorus once or twice a month at the local commons, more often during a harvest.
At some point during your simple life, you have occasion to travel to a great city with a grand cathedral. It is the largest building you've ever seen, adorned by previously unimaginable wealth and splendor. It is God's house. And there is music. It is a haunting, terrible melody that fills your chest with something that you cannot describe.
The sound is so loud that it simply can't be real. The pipe organ creating the noise is a device that you have heard stories about, but it is more impressive than you could ever guess. It is a colossus, a sparkling gilded tribute to God and truly must be the greatest creation of man.
What a world we live in.”
―
At some point during your simple life, you have occasion to travel to a great city with a grand cathedral. It is the largest building you've ever seen, adorned by previously unimaginable wealth and splendor. It is God's house. And there is music. It is a haunting, terrible melody that fills your chest with something that you cannot describe.
The sound is so loud that it simply can't be real. The pipe organ creating the noise is a device that you have heard stories about, but it is more impressive than you could ever guess. It is a colossus, a sparkling gilded tribute to God and truly must be the greatest creation of man.
What a world we live in.”
―
“I brought them up here to illustrate the point of conformity: the difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs in the face of others. Now, those of you -- I see the look in your eyes like, "I would've walked differently." Well, ask yourselves why you were clapping. Now, we all have a great need for acceptance. But you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own, even though others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, "That's baaaaad." Robert Frost said, "Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
― Dead Poets Society
― Dead Poets Society
Tjhenry’s 2025 Year in Books
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