Recently added

I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art.

I’m afraid I’m not a convert or anything. I still see the same blind cosmos governed by the same blind laws. But suddenly it matters. It matters terribly, and means something. What, I haven’t figured out yet. I probably never will. But I have a reason for living, or for dying if need be. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of life: purpose itself. I can’t say. But I expect to enjoy the world a lot more.

Hard to say whether personal immortality would be a good thing or not. Not for the masses, surely! Too many of them as it was. But a select few, like Terangi Maclaren—or was it worth the trouble? Even given boats, chess, music, the No Drama, beautiful women and beautiful spectroscopes, life could get heavy.

“Do you know,” said Maclaren, “there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity.”

“At least we can put a little sense into life.”

“I don’t know whether we do or whether we find what was always there,” he replied. “Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose—order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it—does exist.”

Life was too short for anything but amusement at the human race.

People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be.

Pioneering is an unlimited chance to become the biggest frog, provided the puddle is small enough.

“Your son was in your own tradition.”

“Better, I hope,” said the old man. “There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers.”

You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship.

Men, whose span is cruelly short, rush nonetheless to death in their youth as to a maiden’s arms.

For the ordinary man, instability—change—means dislocation, war, uncertainty, misery, and death.