Arthur C. Clarke

It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.

Though I've often made fun of the scientists, they've freed us forever from the stagnation that was overtaking your race.

All the religiosity around worries me—doesn’t it you?

The idea of death was utterly incongruous—as it is to all men until the final second.

Kolya believed that the Mongols’ expansion was pathological. It was a ghastly spiral of positive feedback, born of Genghis Khan’s unquestioned military genius and fueled by easy conquests, a plague of insanity and destruction that had spread across most of the known world.

Eumenes showed little taste for elaborate protocols; he was far too intelligent for that.

Christine would surely be talking, even if she had only an ape as audience. To her, any silence was as great a challenge as a blank canvas; it had to be filled with the sound of her own voice.

This project was no longer mathematics; it was engineering.

There are some things that no amount of pure intelligence can anticipate, but which can only be learned by bitter experience.

Grove was inclined to allow the request. “I can’t see how we can be harmed by allowing the destruction of what I don’t understand anyhow,” he said dryly. “And besides—you say it is your duty, Warrant Officer. I respect that. Time and space may flow like toffee, but duty endures.”

The false logic involved is: “We exist; therefore something—call it X—created us.” Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways.

But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the same logic something must have created X—and so on. We are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have no meaning in the real universe.

There was nothing like a museum for calming the mind, for putting the problems of everyday life in their true perspective. Here, surrounded by the infinite variety and wonder of Nature, he was reminded of truths he had forgotten. He was only one of a million million creatures that shared this planet Earth. The entire human race, with its hopes and fears, its triumphs and its follies, might be no more than an incident in the history of the world.