If a man who can’t count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky?
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.
And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth’s other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn’t understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Furious and wild with fear, the potatoes flailed the air with their leaves and stamped their roots, but obviously this got them nowhere.
We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
I don’t think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence.
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.The Twenty-first Voyage
I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone’s wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.
A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
Simulant – something that doesn’t exist but pretends to….Dissimulant – an object that exists but pretends not to.
Yes, it’s comforting to know, when you think about it, that only man can be a bastard
The horse respects and obeys man because its large eyes magnify everything, so man appears much larger than the horse itself.
One can accomplish something only so long as one cannot accomplish everything.
What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?
…it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.