Clifford D. Simak Quotes
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If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.
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We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe...
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'It’s a wonder to me,' said Adams sourly, 'that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.'
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I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme - if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one.
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It's not the machine itself that does the trick. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the spiritual force. It is an extension of the sensitive. It magnifies the capability of the sensitive and acts as a link of some sort. It enables the sensitive to perform his function.
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Could it be, he wondered, that the goldenness was the Hazers' life force and that they wore it like a cloak, as a sort of over-all disguise? Did they wear that life force on the outside of them while all other creatures wore it on the inside?
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The red thought rose up inside Blaine’s brain: Why not kill him now?For the killing would come easy. He was an easy man to hate. Not on principle alone, but personally, clear down to his guts.
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There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity - I don't know how to say it - that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature's mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.
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These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they’re being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization.
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Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists...
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We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow-a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?
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First there was space-endless, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure.
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Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope...the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.
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'Much of what we see in the universe,' said Hugo, 'starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.'
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The impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance.He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to himself, for a person to believe.
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He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences.
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They sat for a moment, regarding one another; neither understanding. As if we were two aliens, thought Blaine. With viewpoints that did not come within a million miles of coinciding, and yet they both were men.
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What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?
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What is a bow and arrow?It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.It is a symbol of a way of life.
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A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river - but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself - a thing that went on caring.
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'It wouldn’t be the truth,' said Sutton.'That,' said Trevor, 'doesn’t have a thing to do with it.'
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They’d lived all their life on Earth; they knew nothing but the Earth. They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was not really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary.
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He sat and watched them come and he thought of going in to get a rifle, but he didn’t stir from his seat upon the steps. The rifle would do no good, he told himself. It would be a senseless thing to get it; more than that, a senseless attitude. The least that man could do, he thought, was to meet these creatures of another world with clean and empty hands.
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Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.