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We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency.

— John Varley The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)

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Beauty

More quotes by John Varley

The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.

Millennium (1983)

They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances.

Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it.

Millennium (1983)

Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.

Millennium (1983)

I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them.

The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Varley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.