Robert Silverberg Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

He didn't have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.

Robert Silverberg
I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn't have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?

Robert Silverberg
She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.

Robert Silverberg
To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.

Robert Silverberg
We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Robert Silverberg
Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

Robert Silverberg
The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.

Robert Silverberg
Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.

Robert Silverberg
My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.

Robert Silverberg
Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

Robert Silverberg
Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.

Robert Silverberg
Forget it. No, don't forget it. Don't forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.

Robert Silverberg
Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Robert Silverberg
As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational.

Robert Silverberg
So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

Robert Silverberg
It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.

Robert Silverberg
Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you're an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it's a lucky thing for humanity that we're shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I've got, we'd be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible.

Robert Silverberg
They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins.

Robert Silverberg
No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.

Robert Silverberg
Schwartz closed his eyes. My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.

Robert Silverberg
It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

Robert Silverberg
One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

Robert Silverberg
Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.

Robert Silverberg
There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.

Robert Silverberg
In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can't perceive the greater structures, it's because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn't need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we'd be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.

Robert Silverberg