Jack Vance Quotes
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I do not care to listen; obloquy injures my self-esteem and I am skeptical of praise.
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The life we’ve been leading couldn’t last forever. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
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How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real...
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He adjudicated the case in a manner I still find perplexing, but which must have been equitable, since it pleased no one.
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I suppose if you isolate yourself to such an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.
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Ildefonse said ponderously: 'If your analysis is correct, we must undertake to secure the future against this pangynic nightmare.'
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Your thoughts move with the deft precision of worm-tracks in the mud.
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Damned meddlers. It’s hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it’s just curiosity.
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Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it.
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'At Gundar we conceive 'innocence' as a positive quality, not merely an insipid absence of guilt,' stated the Nolde. 'We are not the fools that certain untidy ruffians might suppose.'
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'The contingency is remote.' (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)
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King Aillas talks softly and with great politeness; he has the uncomfortable skill of calling one a false-hearted blackguard, a liar, a cheat and a villain, but making it seem a fulsome compliment.
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In measured tones he answered Madouc: 'Your condition lacks dignity; you bring ridicule upon us all.'Madouc gave a stony shrug. 'If you do not like what you see, look elsewhere.'
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I give dignity second place to expedience.
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A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it’s lessening the tension.
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Consider the human mind! It is capable of amazing feats when used properly. Conversely, without exercise it atrophies to a lump of gray-yellow fat.
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The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.
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If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.
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'Are you yourself a Christian?'The young man made a negative sign. 'The concepts of religion baffle me.''This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,' said the ex-priest. 'It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.'
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You have frightened and daunted me. I will stop stealing at once.
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I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.
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I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.
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If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.
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Sir, your ideas are incorrect in every possible respect.