Creativity Quote by Paul Simon

An island at sunset is gorgeous, solitary, and doomed to darkness. Paul Simon picks that image because it lets faith feel both romantic and vulnerable: something you can stand on, yes, but also something surrounded, shrinking, and partially lit by a light that’s leaving. It’s not an attack line so much as a quiet admission that belief often lives in the late-day glow of feeling and memory, not in the harsh noon of verification.

Then he lands the other shoe with corporate bluntness: “the bottom line.” That phrase is accountant-speak, the language of budgets, contracts, and skeptics who don’t care how moving your story is if it doesn’t add up. The couplet stages a collision between the private lyricism of belief and the public demand for receipts. Even “everyone” is doing work here: Simon isn’t describing a niche of rationalists; he’s saying the proof-hunger is the default setting of modern life, a cultural gravity you don’t easily opt out of.

The intent feels less like preaching and more like reporting from inside a tension his songs return to again and again: spirituality as a human need, and doubt as a social condition. In a late-20th-century America increasingly shaped by science-talk, litigation, and consumer metrics, faith can still be beautiful - but it has to justify itself in a world that audits meaning. The genius is the balance: he makes the believer sympathetic, then reminds you why sympathy doesn’t count as evidence.