. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy–of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause,...

La única posibilidad de descubrir los límites de lo posible es aventurarse un poco más allá de ellos, hacia lo imposible.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the...

The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice.

What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.

He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong.

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the...

Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.

Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.

[“The Devil in the Dark”] impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many...

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological

Humor was the enemy of desire.

How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth,” when it is clearly “Ocean.

In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-bestscience writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fictionwriter.[dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks...

It is hard to draw any line between compassion and love.

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts...

All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.

He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was...

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth – learning and loving. Nothing else – not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake – can possible have the same lasting...

If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter...

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.

They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening towards an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along...

The trouble with cliché’s, some philosopher remarked, probably with a yawn, is that they are so boringly true. But “love at first sight” is never boring.

Personally, I refuse to drive a car – I won’t have anything to do with any kind of transportation in which I can’t read.

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with...

We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good...

Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that...

There were, however, a few exceptions.One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not...

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun’s children.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them—not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

My favourite definition of an intellectual: ‘Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]

..the happy hum of humanity.

Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking...

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.

I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.[IRC discussion at Scifi.com, 1 November 1996]

The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.