"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve"
About this Quote
Holmes slips a radical comfort into a tidy, almost clinical sentence: your life can be justified not by what you finish, but by what you dare to start. The phrasing is deliberately sober - "object of his existence" sounds like something a minister or a Victorian self-help manual might endorse. Then Holmes quietly detonates the premise. Fulfillment, he argues, arrives through failure that is chosen on purpose: a question you cannot answer, a task you cannot achieve.
The intent isn’t to romanticize incompetence. It’s to relocate dignity from outcomes to orientation. Holmes, a physician-poet who lived through America’s brutal mid-century upheavals and watched certainties fracture (scientific, religious, political), writes like someone who respects limits but refuses to worship them. His ideal man is not the conqueror; he’s the striver with a high tolerance for ambiguity.
Subtextually, the line is a defense of restless inquiry against the era’s hunger for moral arithmetic: good lives neatly totaled in accomplishments, reputations, and proofs. Holmes makes the unanswerable question a kind of ethical discipline. If you can’t resolve it, you have to live inside it - which demands humility, patience, and curiosity. Same with the impossible task: attempting it stretches the self beyond the comfortable circumference of talent and circumstance.
It works because it flatters neither ego nor despair. Holmes offers a tougher consolation: meaning is not a prize at the end, but a practice - the courage to stand where certainty stops.
The intent isn’t to romanticize incompetence. It’s to relocate dignity from outcomes to orientation. Holmes, a physician-poet who lived through America’s brutal mid-century upheavals and watched certainties fracture (scientific, religious, political), writes like someone who respects limits but refuses to worship them. His ideal man is not the conqueror; he’s the striver with a high tolerance for ambiguity.
Subtextually, the line is a defense of restless inquiry against the era’s hunger for moral arithmetic: good lives neatly totaled in accomplishments, reputations, and proofs. Holmes makes the unanswerable question a kind of ethical discipline. If you can’t resolve it, you have to live inside it - which demands humility, patience, and curiosity. Same with the impossible task: attempting it stretches the self beyond the comfortable circumference of talent and circumstance.
It works because it flatters neither ego nor despair. Holmes offers a tougher consolation: meaning is not a prize at the end, but a practice - the courage to stand where certainty stops.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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