Jack Vance

Quotes

1. If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another’s mind.

   p. 17

2. 

   Art implies discipline; the more excellent the art, the more rigorous the discipline.

   p. 356

3. 

   My wealth is my shelf of books!

   p. 173

4. 

   I can tell you this at least. The most convincing disguise for legitimacy is legitimacy itself.

   p. 12

5. 

   What good is notoriety if your friends are unable to profit from it?

   p. 381

6. 

   Candor is never indiscreet. Truth, which is to say, the reflection of life, is beautiful.

   p. 381

7. 

   “Humanity is old, civilization is new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth—and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort....We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the men of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Man, as he exists now, with all his faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolute—is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men.”

   p. 179

8. 

   The central problem, so it seemed, was to learn from whose eye he looked forth. Much, after all, would depend upon his viewpoint.

   p. 282

9. 

   “Beauty comes in often to drink. A spaceman, he claims himself, but as to this I can’t be certain. I have often declared myself a great lover. All of us lie, as much or more than necessary. ‘What is truth?’ asks Pons Pilatus, in the fable, and I answer: ‘A commodity as cheap as air which we hide as if it were as precious as yewl stone.’”

   p. 107

10. 

    Motto of the Institute: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; a great deal of knowledge is disaster, which detractors of the Institute scornfully paraphrase to: Somebody else’s ignorance is bliss.

    p. 83

11. 

    “Everyone is the same,” he told himself. “Anxious to arrive and, when they leave, wondering why they came.”

    p. 37

12. 

    “And thereby hangs a tale,” as the monkey said while describing the cat’s rear-quarters.

    p. 193