Arthur C. Clarke - Collected Quotes

"The urge to explore, to discover, to ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star’, is a primary human impulse which needs and can receive no further justification than its own existence." (Arthur C. Clarke, "The Challenge of the Spaceship", 1959)

"To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away - and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles." (Arthur C Clarke, "We'll Never Conquer Space", 1960)

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties are, if it is desired greatly enough." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"No equation, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

"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." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)

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

"Some facts are so incredible that they are believed at once, for no one could possibly have imagined them." (Arthur C. Clarke, "The Lost Worlds of 2001", 1972)

"There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)

"What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts - indeed, sometimes from no facts - in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Light of Other Days", 2000)