"A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what is commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice, and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences."

""God is love" "Love is blind" If these be true, then God is blind: Simple logic would appear to have escaped the theologians. Res ipsa loquitur, love is not blind, neither God's love nor man's, though we all wish at times to escape God's eye, and though it must at times appear that the lover cannot see what we see—unless, of course, we are ourselves that lover. Like God, the lover sees but forgives."

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

"People who fear death live no longer than those who don't, and live scared."

"Could he have murdered a child? He decided that he could not, but that he could certainly have been accused of having done it and worse. Anyone these days—any man, particularly—could be accused of anything by anyone."

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

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

"I have never in my whole life had a fight with a smart person or even seen anybody else have one either. That is because when the fight starts the smart people are not there anymore. They have gone off someplace else, and when it is over they come back and tell you how much they did in the fight, only it is all lies."

"Legend declares that at the christening of our family’s founder a somewhat deaf fairy who had been asked to render him and his descendants mettlesome, made us meddlesome instead."

"A hundred wise men have said in various ways that love transcends the power of death, and millions of fools have supposed that they meant nothing by it. At this late hour in my life I have learned what they meant. They meant that love transcends death. They are correct."

"People who wish to be lost always get their way."

"Prince of parable, I desire to see those gardens of lasting delight which Allah—the Creator! the Ever Beneficent!—reserves for the faithful. How am I to do so if I tell lies?" "By lying to Allah, I suppose."

"He was proud, like all lonely men. Lonely men must be proud or die."

"Very small, child, are the flying days of love, and men and women must catch them when they can, if they are to know love at all."

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

"In the marketplace he told of honor, and how it is a higher law than any law. At the crossroads he talked of freedom, the freedom of the wind and clouds, and freedom that loves all things and is without guilt. Beside the city gates he told stories of the forgotten cities that were and of the forgotten cities that might be, if only men would forget them."

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

"We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there."

"She often spoke of marryin' a butcher or a sausage maker, having a liking for those trades, as she said, for they knew you couldn't never get all the stains from their aprons, and didn't demand it."

"Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas."

"An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith."

"They based their extrapolations on numbers. That worked as long as money, which is easily measured numerically, was the principle motivating force in human affairs. But as time progressed, human actions became responsive instead to a multitude of incommensurable vectors."

"What I would like to know is what I should be doing." "I see what you mean," Freeling said, "but I'm afraid I can't tell you. If you were a lathe operator I'd say make that part, but you're a part of management, and you can't treat managerial people that way." "Go ahead," Forlesen told him. "I won't mind." [...] "What I meant was that if I knew what you ought to be doing I'd hire a clerk to do it. You're where you are because we feel—rightly or wrongly—that you can find your own work, recognize it when you see it, and do it or get somebody else to. Just make damn sure you don't step on anybody's toes while you're doing it, and don't make more trouble than you fix. [...] Don't come running to me with complaints, and don't let me get any complaints about you. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?" "I don't," Forlesen said. "You said you wanted to see me." "Oh. Well, I'm through."

"Of the nature of Death and the Dead we may enumerate twelve kinds. First there are those who become new gods, for whom new universes are born. Second those who praise. Third those who fight as soldiers in the unending war with evil. Fourth those who amuse themselves among flowers and sweet springs with sports. Fifth those who dwell in gardens of bliss, or are tortured. Sixth those who continue as in life. Seventh those who turn the wheel of the universe. Eighth those who find in their graves their mothers' wombs and in one life circle forever. Ninth ghosts. Tenth those born again as men in their grandsons' time. Eleventh those who return as beasts or trees. And last those who sleep."

"Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later."

"It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on clasping her illness to her it will not."

"“That the environment should respond to human thought. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of mankind.”"

"No man has a home unless he is master of a place where he must please no one—a place where he can go and lock the door behind him."

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

"The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice."

"I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same."

"Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival."

"War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination."

"There was bitter resistance to the idea. It was demanded that Burke justify his views in a more reasonable way than by mere demonstration that they worked."

"When in the course of human events somebody does something that puts somebody else to the trouble of adjusting the numb routine of his life, the adjustee is resentful. The richer he is and the more satisfactory he considers his life, the more resentful he is at any change, however minute. And of all the changes which offend people, changes which require them to think are most disliked."

"There are some people so stupid you have to show them everything. I didn’t realize that there are people so stupid you can’t show them anything."

"And this was no observation by a mere human, who might delude himself. This was a report from complex electronic devices. It was images formed on phosphors coated on radar screen tubes, excited by accelerated electrons whose pattern of impact was governed by echoes from the original of the image. Phosphors do not imagine. Electrons are not affected by panic. As a radar image it was a faithful report—in its own terms, without interpretation—of something that actually was."

"Herb doctor is the polite term used by witch doctors when they advertise their services in newspapers. It is commonly believed that they can relieve all situations not caused by a judge or a grand jury."

"Lane understood. Burke was one of that considerable part of humanity which enthusiastically believes in anything that’s sufficiently dramatic."

"He’d caused the First Native War on Mars, by taking advantage of the fact that at that time human law had not defined the killing of Martians as murder."

"The secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels."

"Lon frowned. “They’re so far ahead of us,” he said uneasily, “that they could conquer us if they wanted to. And that’s bad!” “Lon!” said the older man severely. “They’re civilized! Civilized men don’t want to conquer other men!”"

"The unfamiliar is not necessarily unreasonable."

"“Put dispassionately,” said Haynes cheerfully, “you sound like you’re crazy. But you’re stating facts. Okay so far.”"

"And, just as she had responded to primitive prowess, so Ron reacted to feminine admiration by an enormously increased urge to accomplish."

"Her eyes upon him were soft. Civilized people act upon intellectualized motives. They decide what is wise, and sometimes do it. But when they are swayed by purest primitive instincts they are usually happier. Hana was responding to one of the most ancient of all known human impulses—admiration of a proved warrior."

"Logics don’t work good on women. Only on things that make sense."

"My purpose is not to make profits, but to keep people from being killed. Quaint, eh? But I’m one of the people I don’t want killed."

"“I’ve got an impossible job on my hands,” he told them, “and if I succeed at it, there’s an inconceivable one to follow.”"

"My specialty is the mechanics of research. But I test my theories about how to make discoveries by using them to make discoveries."