Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them-not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.

Humor was the enemy of desire.

He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.

They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.

[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]

The rash assertion that "God made man in His own image" is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

How inappropriate to call this planet "Earth," when it is clearly "Ocean.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence - or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” - John W. Campbell

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

["The Devil in the Dark"] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.

Personally, I refuse to drive a car - I won't have anything to do with any kind of transportation in which I can't read.

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

...science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could.

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy-of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.

What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

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