# Quote — Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion

> “Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.”
>
> “Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.
>
> “Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.
>
> “No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”
>
> “A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.
>
> Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
>
> “Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

- Author: [Dan Simmons](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dan-simmons.md)
- Book: [The Rise of Endymion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dan-simmons/the-rise-of-endymion.md)
- Page: 166
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons#The_Rise_of_Endymion_(1997)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/dan-simmons/the-rise-of-endymion/pascals-wager-never

## More from this book

> If one is to observe, M. Endymion, one must be in the proper place to observe.

p. 701 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dan-simmons/the-rise-of-endymion/if-one-is-to-observe.md)

> “One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

p. 674 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dan-simmons/the-rise-of-endymion/one-of-the.md)

> There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.

p. 578 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dan-simmons/the-rise-of-endymion/there-are-no-ghosts.md)