David Zindell Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

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

David Zindell
Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?

David Zindell
What's beautiful is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations.

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

David Zindell
To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?

David Zindell
In time, the heart of each religion grows hard and dies. And so seekers of the godly will always turn to new prophets and new ways, never realizing that, ultimately, all religions separate man from God.

David Zindell
Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?

David Zindell
Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words.

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

David Zindell
Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart's deep love.

David Zindell
For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

David Zindell
Any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes.

David Zindell
The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost.
"The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being."
"Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow."
"About some things there is no other way to speak."

David Zindell
But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever...

David Zindell
I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.

David Zindell
This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself.

David Zindell
Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety.

David Zindell
You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.

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

David Zindell
That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.

David Zindell
Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made.

David Zindell
The elite of the universal religions have always substituted belief in the Infinite for the experience of it. We all need God — but only in small and measured doses. Who can look upon the burning bush and not be destroyed in its flames? Who can bear the heaven and hell of each moment blazing in time? Who can shine like a star? And so, for all but a few of the manswarm, the rare ones who are truly human, it is better to glimpse such a miracle through a dark glass or to grasp it through words only.

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?

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

David Zindell
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

David Zindell
The true human being... is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities.

David Zindell
For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.

David Zindell
"All living things are afraid to die."
"No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."

David Zindell
For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.

David Zindell
In an infinite universe, every point in space-time is the center.

David Zindell