Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it's an ideal we don't all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.

Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.

My dear Rikki," Karellen retorted, "it's only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!" Despite himself, Stormgren smiled.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.

And Stormgren hoped that when Karellen was free to walk once more on Earth, he would one day come to these northern forests, and stand beside the grave of the first man to be his friend.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.

Don't believe anything I've told you—merely because I said it.

Science fiction could now be made far more convincing by science fact.

Poole and Bowman had often humorously referred to themselves as caretakers or janitors aboard a ship that could really run itself. They would have been astonished, and more than a little indignant, to discover how much truth that jest contained.

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play

And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.

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

Much blood has also been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: 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.

For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion–the cause of so much misery and so much poetry–that every man has only one real love in his life.

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.

Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his own planet. It was much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.

He did not wander aimlessly, though he never knew which village would be his next port of call. He was seeking no particular place, but a mood, an influence—indeed, a way of life.

So the problem of Evil never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance.

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

Imagine that every man's mind is an island, surrounded by ocean. Each seems isolated, yet in reality all are linked by the bedrock from which they spring. If the ocean were to vanish, that would be the end of the islands. They would all be part of one continent, but the individuality would have gone

Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space.

A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.

In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped.

It is vital to remember that information-- in the sense of raw data-- is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.