“If we both believe that we have nothing to learn from the other, is it not obvious that we will both be wrong?”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“And 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.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Faith in one’s own destiny was among the most valuable of the gifts which the gods could bestow upon a man,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence—indeed, a way of life.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“However much the universe and its mysteries might call him, this was where he was born and where he belonged. It would never satisfy him, yet always he would return. He had gone half-way across the Galaxy to learn this simple truth.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. All these media still survived in Diaspar and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered, or if it had any meaning outside the mind of Man. And the same was true of love.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“They had forgotten much, but they did not know it. They were as perfectly fitted to their environment as it was to them—for both had been designed together. What was beyond the walls of the city was no concern of theirs; it was something that had been shut out of their minds. Diaspar was all that existed, all that they needed, all that they could imagine. It mattered nothing to them that Man had once possessed the stars.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“In Lys, it seemed, all love began with mental contact, and it might be months or years before a couple actually met. In this way, Hilvar explained, there could be no false impressions, no deceptions, on either side. Two people whose minds were open to one another could hide no secrets.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could affect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Like every human being, Alvin was in some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to loneliness or frustration. To his own people, he was so unaccountable a creature that they sometimes forgot that he still shared their emotions.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“It was idle to speculate, to build pyramids of surmise on a foundation of ignorance.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Otsusta minu üle mu tegude järgi, ehkki neid on vähe, mitte mu sõnade järgi, kuigi neid on palju.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness—the world of the desert—the world of the Invaders.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Oh, I can think of many reasons. Perhaps it’s a signal, so that any strange ship entering our universe will know where to look for life. Perhaps it marks the centre of galactic administration. Or perhaps—and somehow I feel that this is the real explanation—it’s simply the greatest of all works of art. But it’s foolish to speculate now. In a few hours we shall know the truth.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“That suggested two possibilities. It was either too unintelligent to understand him—or it was very intelligent indeed, with its own powers of choice and volition. In that case, he must treat it as an equal. Even then he might underestimate it—but it would bear him no resentment, for conceit was not a vice from which robots often suffered.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples: he shrank from diverting its course.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“The history of the Universe must be a mass of such disconnected threads, and no one could say which were important and which were trivial.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. Men”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“You are rather too fond of talking in riddles,’ complained Jeserac.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“And as for the Council—tell it that a road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.’ The”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“A thousand years in one body is long enough for any man; at the end of that time, his mind is clogged with memories, and he asks only for rest—or a new beginning.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
“Evolution and science had come to the same answers; and the work of Nature had lasted longer. At”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The City and the Stars
Arthur C. Clarke
Born place: in Minehead, Somerset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date December 16, 1917
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“Does this thing have fast forward?” Sorenson asked. “Hold down the shift key,” the kid said.”
― Lee Child, quote from A Wanted Man
“The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.”
― Margaret MacMillan, quote from Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
“Smokers always waxed poetic about the ritual of it, how a large part of the satisfaction was packing the box and pulling the foil wrapper and plucking an aromatic stick. They claimed they loved the lighting, the ashing, the feeling of being able to hold something between their fingers. That was all well and good, but there was nothing quite like actually smoking it: Leigh loved inhaling. To pull with your lips on that filter and feel the smoke drift across your tongue, down your throat, and directly into your lungs was to be transported momentarily to nirvana. She remembered- every day- how it felt after the first inhale, just as the nicotine was hitting her bloodstream. A few seconds of both tranquility and alertness, together, in exactly the right amounts. Then the slow exhale- forceful enough so that the smoke didn't merely seep from your mouth but not so energetic that it disrupted the moment- would complete the blissful experience.”
― Lauren Weisberger, quote from Chasing Harry Winston
“Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then ... then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, quote from Min kamp 2
“What if I decide my destiny is someone else?'
'Then that's your decision and I would respect that. Also I know a whole lot of gods to smite whoever it is you choose instead of me.'
'You-'
'Kidding! Totally kidding. Mostly kidding. Okay, not really kidding”
― Kiersten White, quote from The Chaos of Stars
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