Quotes from The Garden of Rama

Arthur C. Clarke ·  518 pages

Rating: (18.9K votes)


“Jealousy is a terrible thing. “It doth mock the meat it feeds upon” is an understatement. Jealousy is completely consuming, totally irrational, and absolutely debilitating. The most wonderful people in the world are nothing but raging animals when trapped in the throes of jealousy.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Garden of Rama


“[T]hese leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Garden of Rama


“We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Garden of Rama


“But the characteristic that is truly special about our species...[is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme....”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Garden of Rama


“The cause of suffering is desire,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Garden of Rama



About the author

Arthur C. Clarke
Born place: in Minehead, Somerset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date December 16, 1917
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“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

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