Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

217 Sourced Quotes

With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible — and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was scarcely dry from their pens.

Arthur C. Clarke
Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.

Arthur C. Clarke
Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That's why you need a captain. You can't run a ship by a committee-at least not all the time.

Arthur C. Clarke
The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.

Arthur C. Clarke
Before one attempts to set up in business as a prophet, it is instructive to see what success others have made of this dangerous occupation — and it is even more instructive to see where they have failed.

Arthur C. Clarke
The universes... drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time.

Arthur C. Clarke
Though the specific ideals of astronautics are new, the motives and impulses underlying them are old as the race — and in the ultimate analysis, they owe as much to emotion as to reason. Even if we could learn nothing in space that our instruments would not already tell us, we should go there just the same.

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

Arthur C. Clarke
"But no-one expected he'd ever get very far, because I don't suppose he could even integrate e to the x." "Is such ignorance possible?" gasped someone.

Arthur C. Clarke
There are still some scientists who consider that there is no point in sending men into space, even when it becomes technically possible; machines, they argue, can do all that is necessary. Such an outlook is incredibly shortsighted; worse than that, it is stupid, for it completely ignores human nature.

Arthur C. Clarke
Whoever attempts to erect a building, should take care that the foundation be securely laid; so also in our inquiries after truth, all our proceedings should be founded upon just and incontrovertible grounds.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
No dead weight shall be carried for a moment longer than necessary.

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

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

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

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

Arthur C. Clarke