Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for a secular farewell, free from religious customs.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke conveys his preference for a non-religious funeral, suggesting that he values a personal and introspective approach to death over traditional religious rites. This perspective highlights a broader philosophical stance on the significance of individual choices in matters of life and death, emphasizing rationalism and personal belief systems rather than communal religious practices.
In practice
During a discussion about personal beliefs regarding funerals, someone might reference this quote to advocate for non-religious ceremonies.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
Violence never settles anything right: apart from injuring your own soul, it injures the best cause. It lingers on long after the object of hate has disappeared from the scene to plague the lives of those who have employed it against their foes.
So much is not known about disability and so much feared. I can understand that because if we're not everywhere, if access and attitudes means we don't get to mingle and be in the same places as everyone else, then how do you know who we are?
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.
As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
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