8 Quotes by Sean J. Halford

It’s tragic that most of us spend our private lives paradoxically thinking something is watching us and permanently disapproving. We say we believe in benevolent deities but smear them with hate and the power to smite. We see sin everywhere, when the only sin is when we forget to treat each other with respect. That is the sad secret that makes the Universe vulnerable.

We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…

Love, I guess, is as much a way of life as it is a constellation of feelings: you become used to each other, you become each other’s habits.

Anybody who has done high school physics knows Newton’s Third Law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You push against a wall; it pushes back against you. I love the poetry hidden in these truths, in the many laws we’ve discovered that underpin the universal fabric. We search for meaning ever hungrier, perhaps even with desperation: the symmetry in the equations freaks us out; for all we know, there is just us on this lonely little marble in the inky void.

Tears are a wonderful thing; they wash, they warm, they are the rivers that run through our minds, seeking release. In their salinity they remind us that we came from the sea. Our cells know this, and go about their machinations, ceaselessly recreating the primordial brine. We are water, whether or not the Spirit of God once hovered formless and magnificent above the idea of us, in some ancient place before the Singularity uncoiled itself into space and time.

How do you quantify love? Can you weigh it, measure it, pin it down with equations? If the sum of all experiences is really just the interaction of a finite soup of chemicals copulating in nerve endings, how did this even dare articulate the infinite?Mathematicians will tell you there are different types of infinities. Some are countable, some are not. We can love someone more and more; we can stop loving. But we can never guess how much all this is. Love has no units.

I’ve whittled my fascination with the cosmos down to this mantra: we can imagine the Universe as a giant void racing away from us at a frightening speed, or it could occur to us that, in fact, it is wrapped around us in all directions. Then, no matter where we are, we are at the centre of something wonderful. And that’s how I’ve always thought about it.

My mother once said if you can’t handle the fact that your world-view might be entirely inaccurate, you are not worthy of believing in it.