Quotes from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Now I can rejoice that I knew you, rather than mourn because I lost you.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“...if one had to think about every footstep one took, ordinary walking would be impossible.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Problems seldom go away if they’re ignored.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Don’t believe anything I’ve told you—merely because I said it.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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?”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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...”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Here the trees surrounded them with an invisible, anechoic blanket, so that every word seemed sucked into silence the moment it was uttered.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“He’s a creature of today—not haunted by the past or fearful of the future!”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, “What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“harsh verdict of the great philosopher Lucretius: all religions were fundamentally immoral, because the superstitions they peddled wrought more evil than good.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“Ya sé, desde luego, que la Atlántida de Platón nunca existió en realidad. Por esta misma razón, nunca podrá morir. Siempre será un ideal, un sueño de perfección , una meta que inspirará a los hombres en la posteridad.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

“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,”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from The Songs Of Distant Earth

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Popular quotes

“The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process—the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action—the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, quote from The Storyteller

“Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, ‘On the Knowledge of Character’ (1822)”
― Alan Bennett, quote from The Lady In The Van

“You probably know that you are not the only man who has had to sacrifice immediate monetary remuneration for the sake of gathering knowledge, for in truth your experience has been that of every philosopher from the time of Socrates down to the present.”
― Napoleon Hill, quote from The Law of Success

“Cultivation means you will be creating something around yourself which you are not.”
― Osho, quote from Moral, Immoral, Amoral: What Is Right and What Is Wrong?

“Over the past decade Stallman created a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. But Gnu’s much more than just a text editor. It’s easy to customize to your personal preferences. It’s a foundation upon which other programs can be built. It even has its own mail facility built in. Naturally, our physicists demanded Gnu; with an eye to selling more computing cycles, we installed it happily.”
― quote from The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.