"Until you know that life is interesting - and find it so - you haven't found your soul"
About this Quote
Fisher’s line smuggles a bracingly non-ascetic theology into a single condition: your “soul” doesn’t announce itself through withdrawal from the world, but through appetite for it. The hinge is that double move - “know” life is interesting, and then “find it so.” Belief alone is cheap; the real test is whether your attention has been converted. He’s not praising novelty for novelty’s sake, but describing a spiritual posture: a trained receptivity that meets the given world as charged with meaning.
As a 20th-century Anglican cleric, Fisher is speaking in the shadow of two world wars and a rapidly secularizing Britain, when “soul” could sound like a relic and “life” could look like rubble or routine. The sentence answers both cynicism and piety. Against cynicism, it insists that boredom is not sophistication but a failure of perception. Against piety, it quietly rebukes the grim religiosity that treats seriousness as synonymous with holiness. If you can’t be interested, you may be performing virtue rather than inhabiting it.
The subtext is pastoral and slightly impatient: stop waiting for a mystical signature moment. Start by noticing. “Interesting” is disarmingly modest - not “beautiful” or “good” or “just,” words that trigger argument. Interesting is accessible; it’s the first rung of wonder. Fisher turns curiosity into a moral and spiritual barometer: the soul is less a hidden object to be discovered than a capacity that wakes up when the world stops being wallpaper.
As a 20th-century Anglican cleric, Fisher is speaking in the shadow of two world wars and a rapidly secularizing Britain, when “soul” could sound like a relic and “life” could look like rubble or routine. The sentence answers both cynicism and piety. Against cynicism, it insists that boredom is not sophistication but a failure of perception. Against piety, it quietly rebukes the grim religiosity that treats seriousness as synonymous with holiness. If you can’t be interested, you may be performing virtue rather than inhabiting it.
The subtext is pastoral and slightly impatient: stop waiting for a mystical signature moment. Start by noticing. “Interesting” is disarmingly modest - not “beautiful” or “good” or “just,” words that trigger argument. Interesting is accessible; it’s the first rung of wonder. Fisher turns curiosity into a moral and spiritual barometer: the soul is less a hidden object to be discovered than a capacity that wakes up when the world stops being wallpaper.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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