Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

Using material ferried up by rockets, it would be possible to construct a "space station" in... orbit. The station could be provided with living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who would be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service. (1945)

Arthur C. Clarke
The Solar System is rather a large place, though whether it will be large enough for so quarrelsome an animal as Homo sapiens remains to be seen.

Arthur C. Clarke
Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

Arthur C. Clarke
The Solar System, comprising the nine known worlds of our Sun and their numerous satellites, is a relatively compact structure, a snug little celestial oasis in an endless desert.

Arthur C. Clarke
In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.

Arthur C. Clarke
Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

Arthur C. Clarke
The thing's hollow - it goes on forever - and - oh my God! - it's full of stars.

Arthur C. Clarke
We have seen that there is little likelihood of encountering intelligence elsewhere in the Solar System. That contact may have to wait for the day, perhaps ages hence, when we can reach the stars. But sooner or later it must come.

Arthur C. Clarke
The sea which beats against the coasts of Earth, which seems so endless and so eternal, is as the drop of water on the slide of a microscope compared with the shoreless sea of space.

Arthur C. Clarke
The universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation.

Arthur C. Clarke
No man who has lived all his life on the surface of a planet has ever seen the stars, only their feeble ghosts. The Road to the Sea, Spring

Arthur C. Clarke
Only little minds are impressed by size and number.

Arthur C. Clarke
The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars.

Arthur C. Clarke
The entire sweep of human history from the dark ages into the unknown future was considerably less important at the moment than the question of a certain girl and her feelings toward him.

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

Arthur C. Clarke
Every thoughtful man has often asked himself: Is our race the only intelligence in the universe, or are there other, perhaps far higher, forms of life elsewhere? There can be few questions more important than this, for upon its outcome may depend all philosophy — yes, and all religion, too.

Arthur C. Clarke
No dead weight shall be carried for a moment longer than necessary.

Arthur C. Clarke
"I'd be glad to settle without the theory," remarked Kimball, "if I could even understand what this thing is — or what it's supposed to do."

Arthur C. Clarke
The urge to explore, to discover, to "follow knowledge like a sinking star," is a primary human impulse which needs and can receive no further justification than its own existence.

Arthur C. Clarke
The choice, as Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing.... The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.

Arthur C. Clarke
There are more suns in the whole of space than there are grains of sand on all the shores of Earth; and on any one of those grains, there may be civilizations that will make us look like primitive, ignorant savages.

Arthur C. Clarke
Jesearc sat motionless within a whirlpool of numbers.... He was fascinated by the way in which the numbers he was studying were scattered, apparently according to no laws, across the spectrum of integers.

Arthur C. Clarke
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.

Arthur C. Clarke
Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space.

Arthur C. Clarke
Prophecy is a dangerous and thankless business, frequently fatal to those who practice it.

Arthur C. Clarke
We will not exhaust the marvels of the physical Universe until we have explored the whole Cosmos - and that prospect is still, to say the least, satisfyingly remote, if indeed it is theoretically possible. We have scarcely begun a voyage of discovery which may never have an end.

Arthur C. Clarke
Given power and knowledge (wisdom is rather useful, too) nothing that does not infringe the laws of Nature need be regarded as impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke
Some facts are so incredible that they are believed at once, for no one could possibly have imagined them.

Arthur C. Clarke
The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.

Arthur C. Clarke
Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.

Arthur C. Clarke