Arthur C. Clarke Quotes
-
The best proof that there’s intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn’t come here.
-
If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him.
-
Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can’t think of it.
-
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.
-
The Ramans do everything in threes.
-
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...
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
Even though you were once a goddess, Kalidasa’s heaven was only an illusion.
-
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.
-
If children have interests then education happens.
-
One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again.
-
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.
-
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.
-
A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true.
-
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.
-
Long ago, he had made that choice between work and life that can seldom be avoided at the highest levels of human endeavor … Any fool could shuffle genes, and most did. But whether or not history gave him credit, few men could have achieved what he had done - and was about to do.
-
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.