Quotes from David Zindell

A man lusts to become a god... and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?

The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god.

All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.

Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained.

Who would bring light must endure burning.

Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise

Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind.

What is a human being, then?' 'A seed.' 'A ... seed?' 'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.

It's not enough to look for the truth, however a noble journey that might be. [...] You must be able to say "yes" to what you see. [...] He is the yeasayer who could look upon evil, disease and suffering, all the worst incarnations of the Eternal No, and not fall insane. He is the great-souled one who can affirm the truth of the Universe.

We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them.

when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit and tribal wisdom lest the truth make you insane [...] you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected to the image of the world [...]

If you kill me, you kill yourself." [...] He only wanted to convey to Janegg the truth of ahimsa, which is that all beings were connected to each other in the deepest way and thus it was impossible to harm another without harming oneself.

The deep structure of the universe is pure consciousness.

evil cannot be vanquished with a sword, and darkness cannot be defeated in battle but only by shining a bright enough light.

The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...

For our kind, there's always the burning to be more. (...) that is why true human beings feel more pain. Because we are more, but it's never quite enough - never.

Do you hear the ticking, Mallory, my brave, foolish, young pilot? Time—it ticks, it runs, it twists, it dilates, shrinks, and kills, and one day for each of us, no matter what we do, it stops. Stops, do you hear me?

There are three requisites for growth without bound, and only three: the will to remake oneself, the genius to survive, and the strength to suffer.

It is both mysterious and miraculous that roughly the same intelligence necessary to flake a barbed spearpoint is sufficient to discover the theorems of mathematics. In a different universe, it might have been otherwise. And so human beings would have been spared the tragedy of existing half as ape and half as god.

What did the mystic say to the hot dog vendor?" Sophia's eyebrows pulled together. "I don't know, Isaiah, what did the mystic say?" "Make me one with everything.

A man lusts to become a god…and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?

Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. ~ David Zindell

In every man and woman there are three phases of life more descriptive of the soul's inner journey than are childhood, maturity and old age: It can't happen to me; I can overcome it; I accept it.

In their clean white robes, with their white– gloved hands shielding their eyes against the glare, they looked like immaculate toy dolls saluting the rising sun.