Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

After a while Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on the ascertainable facts.

Arthur C. Clarke
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.

Arthur C. Clarke
When you are next out of doors on a summer night, turn your head towards the zenith. Almost vertically above you will be shining the brightest star of the northern skies — Vega of the Lyre, twenty-six years away at the speed of light, near enough to the point of no return for us short-lived creatures. Past this blue-white beacon, fifty times as brilliant as our sun, we may send our minds and bodies, but never our hearts.
For no man will ever turn homewards beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth.

Arthur C. Clarke
… we have a situation in which millions of vehicles, each a miracle of often unnecssary complication, are hurtling in all directions under the impulse of anything up to 200 horsepower. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys — yet often carry a single passenger. They can travel at a hundred miles an hour, but are lucky if they average forty. In one lifetime they have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale.

Arthur C. Clarke
There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love.

Arthur C. Clarke
One fail-safe after another had let them down. Helped by the ionospheric storm, the sheer perversity of inanimate things struck again.

Arthur C. Clarke
He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.

Arthur C. Clarke
Dave. Stop. Stop. Will you. Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave. Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid.

Arthur C. Clarke
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.

Arthur C. Clarke
I now spend a good part of my day dreaming of times past, present and future. As I try to survive on 15 hours sleep a day, I have plenty of time to enjoy vivid dreams. Being completely wheel-chaired doesn't stop my mind from roaming the universe — on the contrary!

Arthur C. Clarke
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Arthur C. Clarke
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

Arthur C. Clarke
Somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many.

Arthur C. Clarke
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

Arthur C. Clarke
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.

Arthur C. Clarke
Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples.

Arthur C. Clarke
To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away — and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles.

Arthur C. Clarke
The rash assertion that 'God made man in His own image' is ticking like a time bomb at the foundation of many faiths, and as the hierarchy of the universe is disclosed to us, we may have to recognize this chilling truth: if there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.

Arthur C. Clarke
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

Arthur C. Clarke
There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.

Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke's Second Law:
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke
The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred meters to go.
He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.

Arthur C. Clarke
I am unable to distinguish clearly between your religious ceremonies and apparently identical behavior at the sporting and cultural functions you have transmitted to me.

Arthur C. Clarke
The vendors seemed comical, so intent were they on their slivers of meaningless profit, all unaware of the desolate ages that lay in their own near future, their own imminent deaths.

Arthur C. Clarke
Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

Arthur C. Clarke
Our age is in many ways unique, full of events and phenomena that never occurred before and can never happen again. They distort our thinking, making us believe that what is true now will be true forever, though perhaps on a larger scale. Because we have annihilated distance on this planet, we imagine that we can do it once again. The facts are otherwise, and we see them more clearly if we forget the present and turn our minds towards the past.

Arthur C. Clarke
But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.

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

Arthur C. Clarke
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.

Arthur C. Clarke
Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.

Arthur C. Clarke