When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
Interpretation
Planning your journey is crucial to avoid failing to achieve your goals.
Isaac Asimov emphasizes the importance of having a clear vision or destination when embarking on any endeavor. Without knowing where you want to end up, your efforts may become misguided, leading to wasted time and potential, similar to how a river may dry up leaving it unable to reach the ocean if it loses its course.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to inspire students about the importance of planning their future.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
I didn't fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.
Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.
Knowing things is magical, if other people don't know them.
Trials make more room for consolation. There is nothing that makes a man have a big heart like a great trial. I always find that little, miserable people, whose hearts are about the size of a grain of mustard seed, never have had much to try them. I have found that those people who have no sympathy for their fellows β who never weep for the sorrows of others β very seldom have had any woes of their own. Great hearts can only be made by great troubles.
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