A purpose of human life is to love whoever is around to be loved. —Kurt Vonnegut

 

Memorial to those lost at sea, Cardiff, Wales, UK

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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. 

This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor’s tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.


—Arthur Schopenhauer

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As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. 

Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. 

It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element... 

Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the riddles of the universe.

—Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) 

The Riddle of the Universe

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I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things and they come
toward me, to meet and be met.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I-I

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