On Literature: On Nature (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world." (Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground", 1864)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"From a caprice of nature, not from the ignorance of man. Not a mistake has been made in the working. But we cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones." (Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1870)

"Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1874)

"When we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly  upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strangeby-paths into which the human spirit may wander." (Arthur C Doyle," Lot No. 249’", 1892)

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "Nausea", 1938)

"Natural phenomena are less often produced by nature and most often produced by man." (Alfred Bester, "The Devil’s Invention", 1950)

"Is there anything more contemptible than Nature? The scientists, the philosophers have always tried to understand Nature, while the thing to do is to destroy it!" (Stanislaw Lem, "The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius", 1971)

"Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction." (Kate Wilhelm, 1974) 

"The force of gravity-though it is the first force with which we are acquainted, and though it is always with us, and though it is the one with a strength we most thoroughly appreciate-is by far the weakest known force in nature. It is first and rearmost." (Isaac Asimov, 1976)

"In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data." (Carl Sagan, "The Dragons of Eden", 1977)

"One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them [...] these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension - between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see - is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain - or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create? - are the ones found in the world around us." (John Barnes, "Mother of Storms", 1994)

 "Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens." (Peter Watts, "Echopraxia", 2014)

"One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen." (Kenneth W Ford)

On Literature: On Divinity (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will." (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", 1601)

"There's such divinity doth hedge a king,

That treason can but peep to what it would." (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", 1601)

"A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of storm-chariots. The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-stars. A s surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six..." (Henry D Thoreau, "The Journal Of Thoreau" Vol. 2, 1856) 

"In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points? In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points? In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce - did not the eyes of mine behold it - that blessed being, a Cube, with eight terminal points? And in Four Dimensions, shall not a moving Cube - alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth if it be not so - shall not, I say the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points?" (Edwin A Abbott, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions", 1884)

"Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known." (Clifford D Simak, "City", 1952)

"What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history', - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your only clue. Get the facts!" (Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love", 1973)

"The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus." (Robert Silverberg, "Homefaring", 1983)

On Literature: On Extrema (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"All evils are equal when they are extreme." (Pierre Corneille, "Horace", 1639)

"It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another." (Jonathan Swift, "A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome,", 1701)

"The extreme limit of wisdom — that's what the public calls madness." (Jean Cocteau, "Le Coq et l'Arlequin", 1918)

"Of course she believed the blessed lie, for in times of extreme peril it is human to be optimistic." (Roman F Starzl, "The Planet of Despair", 1931)

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Exploration of Space", 1951)

"The mind can go either direction under stress - toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training." (Frank Herbert, "Dune", 1965)

"Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life - which is fundamentally dependent on light - to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that." (Isaac Asimov, "Nightfall: and other stories", 1969) 

"'It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology', Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. 'The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and? undersurface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It also has its upthrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.'" (Raphael A Lafferty, "Continued on Next Rock", 1970)

"Extremes of any sort are a liability, in terms of evolution. Extreme intellect may be as bad for us as extreme physical size was for the dinosaurs." (Joan Slonczewski, "The Wall around Eden", 1989)

"We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion." (Michael Crichton, "Mediasaurus: The decline of conventional media", [Speech at the National Press Club] 1993) 

"Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no struck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes." (Frank Schätzing, "The Swarm", 2004)

Robert Silverberg - Collected Quotes

"It was beyond him how someone could voluntarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutant-battling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum." (Robert Silverberg, "MUgwump 4" 1959)

"He swung dizzily along the line of time, as he had done so often before. He saw himself, here and here, and saw others, shadow-figures, dream-figures, lurking behind the curtains of time." (Robert Silverberg, "Open the Sky", 1966)

"Forget it. No, don't forget it. Don't forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

"The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

"You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly." (Robert Silverberg, "The Man in the Maze", 1969)

 "You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition." (Robert Silverberg, "Breckenridge and the Continuum", 1973)

"He didn't have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"To a dead the whole universe is plastic, nothing’s real, nothing matters a hell of a lot, it’s all only a joke." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)

"In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can't perceive the greater structures, it's because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn't need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we'd be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing." (Robert Silverberg, "The Stochastic Man", 1975)

"We are born by accident into a purely random universe." (Robert Silverberg, "The Stochastic Man", 1975)

"The only workable time machine ever invented is the science-fiction story." (Robert Silverberg, [introduction] "Trips in Time", 1977)

"The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus." (Robert Silverberg, "Homefaring", 1983)

"Time devours everything. Entire histories vanish. What matters is endurance. The spirit survives and goes onward when the palaces crumble and the kings are forgotten." (Robert Silverberg, "Letters from Atlantis", 1990)

Clive S Lewis - Collected Quotes

"This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact." (Clive S Lewis, "The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism", 1933)

"If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant - but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error." (Clive S Lewis, "Bulverism", 1941)

"The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on." (Clive S Lewis, "The Great Divorce", 1945)

"A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating." (Clive S Lewis, "Mere Christianity", 1952)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]." (Clive S Lewis, “The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, 1964)

"The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time." (Clive S Lewis, "Christian Reflections", 1967)

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” (Clive S Lewis)

"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)

On Experiments (1825-1829)

"[Precision] is the very soul of science; and its attainment afford the only criterion, or at least the best, of the truth of theories, and the correctness of experiments." (John F W Herschel, "A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy", 1830)

"The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science. By this method will that union between the abstract and the concrete be effected which will perfect the uses of mathematical, while extending the positive value of physical science. Meantime, the uses of analysis in physics is clear enough. Without it we should have no precision, and no co-ordination; and what account could we give of our study of heat, weight, light, etc.? We should have merely series of unconnected facts, in which we could foresee nothing but by constant recourse to experiment; whereas, they now have a character of rationality which fits them for purposes of prevision." (Auguste Comte, "The Positive Philosophy", 1830)

"The extreme accuracy required in some of our modern inquiries has, in some respects, had an unfortunate influence, by favouring the opinion, that no experiments are valuable, unless the measures are most minute, and the accordance amongst them most perfect." (Charles Babbage, "Reflections on the Decline of Science in England", 1830)

"The loveliest theories are being overthrown by these damned experiments; it's no fun being a chemist anymore." (Justus von Liebig, [letter to Berzelius] 1834)

"Experimental science hardly ever affords us more than approximations to truth; and whenever many agents are concerned we are in great danger of being mistaken." (Sir Humphry Davy, cca. 1836)

"[…] in order that the facts obtained by observation and experiment may be capable of being used in furtherance of our exact and solid knowledge, they must be apprehended and analysed according to some Conception which, applied for this purpose, gives distinct and definite results, such as can be steadily taken hold of and reasoned from […]" (William Whewell, "The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon their History" Vol. 2, 1840)

"Every theorem in geometry is a law of external nature, and might have been ascertained by generalizing from observation and experiment, which in this case resolve themselves into comparisons and measurements. But it was found practicable, and being practicable was desirable, to deduce these truths by ratiocination from a small number of general laws of nature, the certainty and universality of which was obvious to the most careless observer, and which compose the first principles and ultimate premises of the science." (John S Mill, "System of Logic", 1843)

"The hypothesis, by suggesting observations and experiments, puts us upon the road to that independent evidence if it be really attainable; and till it be attained, the hypothesis ought not to count for more than a suspicion." (John S Mill, "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive", 1843)

"The framing of hypotheses is, for the enquirer after truth, not the end, but the beginning of his work. Each of his systems is invented, not that he may admire it and follow it into all its consistent consequences, but that he may make it the occasion of a course of active experiment and observation. And if the results of this process contradict his fundamental assumptions, however ingenious, however symmetrical, however elegant his system may be, he rejects it without hesitation. He allows no natural yearning for the offspring of his own mind to draw him aside from the higher duty of loyalty to his sovereign, Truth, to her he not only gives his affections and his wishes, but strenuous labour and scrupulous minuteness of attention." (William Whewell, "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences" Vol. 2, 1847)

On Literature: On Errors (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth", 1864)

"A modern branch of mathematics, having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small, can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion, which used to appear insoluble. This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion, admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when dealing with separate elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion. In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)

"What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown." (Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?", 1897)

"All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the 'present state of the question'. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that 'history is bunk." (C. S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters", 1942)

"Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think - as long as they don’t seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste." (Walter M Miller Jr, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", 1959)

"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963)

"A scientist can not be measured quantitatively by the number of degrees or the accumulation of information. A true scientist should have a measure of courage to correct error and seek truth - no matter how painful. The alternative is more painful. To build error upon error is to drift into dogmas, metaphysics, science fiction, and mythology." (Alexander Wilf, "Origin and Destiny of the Moral Species", 1969)

"Man, as such, is a biological error, possibly a too-large brain joined with a full set of primitive instincts that are no longer appropriate, but an error anyway, and [...] he will eventually destroy himself, or be destroyed by his environment, just as all non-appropriate forms of life seem to thrive for a while then die off." (John T. Phillifent, "That Moon Plaque: Comments by Science Fiction Writers’", 1969)

"The machines didn’t tire and the medi-techs never made computational errors but both lacked an essential something. Something only one human being, no matter how inadequate, could give to another." (Leo P. Kelley, "The Handyman", 1965)

"There were times, he said, when human effort appeared to generate nothing but suffering, error, confusion - but maybe even these times add a little to the sum of human understanding." (Edgar Pangborn, "The World Is a Sphere", 1973)

"You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition." (Robert Silverberg, "Breckenridge and the Continuum", 1973)

"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." (Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune", 1976)

"A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)

"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply." (Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995)

John W Campbell Jr. - Collected Quotes

"Can you appreciate the crushing hopelessness it brought to me? I, who love science, who see in it, or have seen in it, the salvation, the raising of mankind - to see those wondrous machines, of man’s triumphant maturity, forgotten and misunderstood. The wondrous, perfect machines that tended, protected, and cared for those gentle, kindly people who had - forgotten." (John W Campbell Jr, "Twilight", 1934)

"No average mind can either understand or enjoy science-fiction; it takes an amount of imagination beyond the average man." (John W. Campbell Jr, "Science-Fiction", 1938)

"Too darned good a machine can be a menace, not a help." (John W. Campbell Jr, [introduction] "Cloak of Aesir", 1951)

"Science fiction is the literature of the Technological Era. It, unlike other literatures, assumes that change is the natural order of things, that there are goals ahead larger than those we know." (John W Campbell Jr, [introduction to "The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology"] 1952)

"Science is not a sacred cow - but there are a large number of would-be sacred cowherds busily devoting quantities of time, energy and effort to the task of making it one, so they can be sacred cowherds." (John W Campbell Jr, "Prologue to Analog", [introduction] 1962)

"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)

"That group of writings which is usually referred to as 'mainstream literature' is, actually, a special subgroup of the field of science fiction - for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so theliterature of here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction." (John W Campbell Jr, [introduction] Analog I, 1963)

Howard P Lovecraft - Collected Quotes

 "I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. [...] We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon." (Howard P Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919)

"Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The White Ship", 1919)

"Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist." (Howard P Lovecraft, "Celephais", 1922)

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", 1926)

"Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories", 1933)

"Scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Shunned House", 1937)

"Men of broader intellect know that there is no clear distinction between the real and the unreal, that things appear as they seem only by virtue of the delicate physical and mental instruments through which we perceive them." (Howard P Lovecraft)

On Literature: On Phenomena (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. [...] We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon." (Howard P Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919)

"The mind of man is not adjusted for a close observation of phenomena that belong to the cosmos." (Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie, "When Worlds Collide", 1932)

"Natural phenomena are less often produced by nature and most often produced by man." (Alfred Bester, "The Devil’s Invention", 1950)

"There are no enemies in science, professor, only phenomena to study." (Charles Lederer, "The Thing (from Another World)", 1951)

"Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it." (Arthur C Clarke, Voices from the Sky", 1965)

"The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems." (Edward Ihnatowicz, "The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception", 1977)

"Time itself, as a phenomenon, is utterly linear and unidirectional." (Orson Scott Card, "PASTWATCH", 1996) 

"Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion." (Iain Banks, "The Algebraist", 2004

"One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of a law prohibiting an event or phenomenon, it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that can happen does happen." (Kenneth W Ford)

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters." (Charles Baudelaire)