Gene Wolfe Short Quotes

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When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment.

Gene Wolfe
Men build scales, but the gods blow upon the lighter pan.

Gene Wolfe
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

Gene Wolfe
He is not mad. He is only more clever than you. It is not the same.

Gene Wolfe
Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

Gene Wolfe
Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

Gene Wolfe
Paradoxes explain everything. Since they do, they cannot be explained.

Gene Wolfe
There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.

Gene Wolfe
There is more to be learned from any good teacher than the subject taught.

Gene Wolfe
That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

Gene Wolfe
When neither our fellows nor our gods spoil our plans, we spoil them ourselves.

Gene Wolfe
Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?

Gene Wolfe
When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.

Gene Wolfe
We're going to fight to the end. But it's better if you fight to somebody else's end.

Gene Wolfe
Be careful about extending credit, too, and doubly careful about refusing to extend it.

Gene Wolfe
Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers.

Gene Wolfe
The gods smile on us, my son, or so it is written. It's a wonder they don't laugh aloud.

Gene Wolfe
People who get eyeball arthritis see only what they're supposed to see, like that TV screen.

Gene Wolfe
Nobody bothers crazy people. [...] In the end, maybe it's the crazy people who win after all.

Gene Wolfe
Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

Gene Wolfe
The only actors who can really do justice to their parts are the ones who don't know what they are.

Gene Wolfe
Every theory is true in some discipline. The beauty of this is that it carries its own confirmation.

Gene Wolfe
What little I have learned in the course of a long life, regarding the gods, I have tried to forget.

Gene Wolfe
Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real.

Gene Wolfe
There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.

Gene Wolfe
When we're young, we notice things that are young, like ourselves. New grass on old graves. New leaves on old trees

Gene Wolfe
I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.

Gene Wolfe
We have treatments for disturbed persons, Nicholas. But, at least for the time being, we have no treatment for disturbing persons.

Gene Wolfe
There is no limit to stupidity. - Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.

Gene Wolfe
Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past.

Gene Wolfe