The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the inevitable separation of humanity from Earth, emphasizing a mother's nurturing role and the eventual need to let go.
In this quote, Arthur C. Clarke personifies Earth as a mother that nurtures her children, humanity, and suggests that the time will come when she must part ways with them. This statement evokes a sense of sadness and inevitability regarding the fate of our planet and the future of humankind, encouraging reflection on our relationship with Earth and the impact of our actions on this home we must ultimately leave.
In practice
During a climate change conference to emphasize the urgency of environmental action.
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'.
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
When you're Black in the United States, you grudgingly grow accustomed to having people deny that your existence is integral to everything that makes this country what it is.
The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles is a parody of the sun and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, copied from the ancient religions of the Eastern world. Every thing told of Christ has reference to the sun. His reported resurrection is at sunrise, and that on the first day of the week; that is, on the day anciently dedicated to the sun, and from thence called Sunday.
Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.
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