#utility

Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox? ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#futility #god #jukebox #love #physics

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#futility #humor #death

There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility. ↗

— Karl Lehmann

#always #church #cultural #ethical #into

The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted. ↗

— Gregor Mendel

#before #cannot #case #conducted #determined