That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of thought and the tendency of the mind to dwell on unresolved questions.
Arthur C. Clarke compares the relentless nature of human thought to a tongue repetitively probing a broken tooth, illustrating how we often fixate on questions or ideas that are ultimately beyond our understanding. This metaphor highlights the futility of searching for answers to certain questions while simultaneously acknowledging the deep-seated curiosity that drives this mental exploration.
In practice
In a discussion about life's mysteries, one might say, 'As Clarke said, that's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly.'
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'.
I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
The cynic says, "One man can't do anything". I say, "Only one man can do anything."
Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist and you will sweep war from the earth.
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.
Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.
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