Flying is a man's job and its worries are a man's worries.
The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives.
Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.
Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred.
We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community.
Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.
This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen.
A mirror reflects a man's face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses.
Anytime you’re on the podium, it’s good.
People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.
The mystery of a person, indeed, is ever divine to him that has a sense for the godlike.