Detachment was all very well, but it could change so easily to indifference.
Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love. Men.
Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear – a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.
With no further clues, it might take the station Computer quite a while – perhaps as much as ten minutes – to locate the line in the whole body of English literature.
Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been.
One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth molded by wind and water.
For it was their world, not Man’s. However he might shape it for his own purposes, it would be his duty always to safeguard the interests of its rightful owners. No one could tell what part they might have to play in the history of the universe. And when, as was one day inevitable, Man himself came to the notice of yet higher races, he might well be judged by his behaviour here on Mars.
Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service – in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist – he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. It.
There was nothing wrong, he reminded himself, with healthy fear; only when it escalated into panic did it become a killer.
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.
Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer, and both had abandoned the attempt. If it had not been for the extraordinary variety of color – the reds and pinks and yellows and salmons and even scarlets – of the atmosphere beneath them, Bowman could have believed that he was flying low over a cloudscape on Earth.
The familiar can be as shocking as the strange – when it is in the wrong place.
Theists believe there’s not more than one God; Deists that there is not less than one God.
Democracy, frequently defined as “Individual greed, moderated by an efficient but not too zealous government.
I don’t believe all this just happened,” Nicole said. “Not on another planet. Not anywhere. Natural evolution simply does not result in the kind of interspecies harmony we have witnessed the last two days.
Dr. C. informs me that, in technical terminology, Hal became trapped in a Hofstadter–Moebius loop, a situation apparently not uncommon among advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. He suggests that for further information you contact Professor Hofstadter himself.
But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The “Dies Irae,” roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered;.
Magic is just science we haven’t figured out yet.
My father always said that you cannot graft a culture of science and engineering onto an Iron Age society. And so it’s proving.’ Bisesa studied him. ‘You’ll have to tell me about your father.
Nevertheless, when you did not know what you were looking for, it was important to avoid all prejudices and preconceptions; something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue.