32 quotes
He knew something of the emotion the artist must feel when his dreams become reality.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
Though I've often made fun of the scientists, they've freed us forever from the stagnation that was overtaking your race.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
For what is life but organized energy?
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
You won’t be an artist if you live a thousand years. You’re merely an expert, and you know it. Those who can—do, those who can’t—criticise.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
It is hardly necessary for me to say that I do not believe in the supernatural; everything that happened has a perfectly rational explanation, obvious to any man with the slightest knowledge of psychology.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
Christine would surely be talking, even if she had only an ape as audience. To her, any silence was as great a challenge as a blank canvas; it had to be filled with the sound of her own voice.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
He had wished to convince himself that Comarre was evil. Now he knew that it was not. There would always be, even in Utopia, some for whom the world had nothing to offer but sorrow and disillusion.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
Yet it was the impression that the unknown master has set out to create, Phoenix-like, from the dying embers of a great legend. He had captured, and held for all future ages to see, that beauty whose service is the purpose of life, and it sole justification.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
A single neutron begins the chain-reaction that in an instant can destroy a million lives and the toil of generations. Equally insignificant and unimportant are the trigger-events which can sometimes change a man’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern of his future.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
“Very ingenious, like all your theories,” said Stormgren. “I wish you’d give them Opus numbers so that I could keep up with them. The objections to this one—”
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
Like the atom bomb, it arose out of equally academic research. Never, gentlemen, underestimate science. I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
Why should men travel, he asked himself bitterly, across the gulf of stars at such expense and risk—merely to land on a spinning slag heap? For the same reason, he knew, that they had once struggled to reach Everest and the Poles and the far places of the Earth—for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery.
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)