Shifting sand Quotes

“When our pride usurps Truth, we walk on the shifting sands of relativism, an ego driven reality.”

“Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa.”

“The shifting sands of the world... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'.”

“The universe likes change. All that appears solid and substantial is built on the shifting sands of ceaseless transformation on the quantum level. Ironically, that’s the one steady factor about the universe - it is always changing, which means our efforts to change are supported by the very nature of Life.”

“What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?" I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. "Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Melphi relplied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.”

“Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the handmaiden of truth.Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery.A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error,for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief.Doubt is the touchstone of truth; it is an acid which eats away the false.Let no man fear for the truth, that doubt may consume it;for doubt is a testing of belief.The truth stands boldly and unafraid; it is not shaken by the testing;For truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger, more secure.He that would silence doubt is filled with fear;the house of his spirit is built on shifting sands.But he that fears no doubt, and knows its use, is founded on a rock.He shall walk in the light of growing knowledge;the work of his hands shall endure.Therefore let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help:It is to the wise as a staff to the blind; doubt is the handmaiden of truth.”

“Our life is like a journey…’ – and so the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle, member of a family and clan and entangled by professional duties, by the habits of an ‘everyday life’ woven from all these circumstances, we often feel too secure, believing our house built for all the future, easily induced to believe in a constancy that makes ageing a problem for one person and each change in external circumstances a catastrophe for another. We forget that this is a process, that the earth is in constant motion and that we too are affected by ebbs and tides, earthquakes and events far beyond our visible and tangible spheres: beggars, kings, figures in the same great game. We forget it for our would-be peace of mind, which then is built on shifting sand. We forget it so as not to fear. And fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands and what affects us directly, denying the force of the fire that’s sweeping our neighbour’s house, but not yet ours. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid – the horror that sometimes seizes us, you feel it too when reading history books, time or space, it doesn’t matter what lies between us and it.But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space – and a city with a magical, unreal name, Samarkand the Golden, Astrakhan or Isfahan, City of Rose Attar, becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath.”