Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
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The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
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If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him.
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Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death...
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We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints.
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Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
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Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it.
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Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination - for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
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The Ramans do everything in threes.
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There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come.
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Somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many.
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If children have interests then education happens.
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2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.
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As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun. Well, I actually don't feel a day older than 89!
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As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
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SETI is probably the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.
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I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
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One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again.
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A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
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We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return … The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation … the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
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Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
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Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..
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There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.
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Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.