Songs of Distant Earth

Now I can rejoice that I knew you, rather than mourn because I lost you.

...if one had to think about every footstep one took, ordinary walking would be impossible.

Problems seldom go away if they’re ignored.

He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes overwhelmed with despair.

Don’t believe anything I’ve told you—merely because I said it.

So the problem of Evil never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance.

There’s an ancient philosophical joke that’s much subtler than it seems. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be?

The Lassans were insatiably inquisitive, and the concept of privacy was almost unknown to them. A Please Do Not Disturb sign was often regarded as a personal challenge, which led to interesting complications...

Here the trees surrounded them with an invisible, anechoic blanket, so that every word seemed sucked into silence the moment it was uttered.

He’s a creature of today—not haunted by the past or fearful of the future!

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That’s why you need a captain. You can’t run a ship by a committee—at least not all the time.

Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, “What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?

harsh verdict of the great philosopher Lucretius: all religions were fundamentally immoral, because the superstitions they peddled wrought more evil than good.

The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.

This was the fundamental problem with rockets—and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.

Apart from this common Lassan tendency to procrastinate, Kumar’s chief defects were an adventurous nature and a fondness for sometimes risky practical jokes. This,

The greatest danger is panic

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

the selection panels had thrown away the Veda, the Bible, the Tripitaka, the Qur’an, and all the immense body of literature—fiction and nonfiction—that was based upon them. Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.

Despite all the wealth of beauty and wisdom these works contained, they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.

We are survivors. The only survivors. And survivors always feel guilty at being alive.

All we want from Thalassa is a hundred thousand tons of water. Or, to be more specific, ice.

He had also received several terabytes of memory implant, and though information stored that way was not really knowledge, it was available if you could recall the access codes.

It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints.

Even if, to the naked human eye, a waterfall and a shower of bricks appeared very different, they were really much the same. The tiny “bricks” of H2O were too small to be visible to the unaided senses, but they could be easily discerned by the instruments of the physicists.

Week by week, month by month, it slowly faded, though even when it moved back into the daylight sky it was still easy to find if one knew exactly where to look. And at night for years it was often the brightest of the stars. Mirissa saw it one last time, just before her eyesight failed.

Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be?

Bad things happened just as often as good; as had long been suspected, the universe simply obeyed the laws of mathematical probability. Certainly there was no sign of any supernatural intervention, either for good or for ill.

anything really important can be expressed in a single sentence