Clifford D. Simak Quotes

Much of what we see in the universe … starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don’t know if it even exists.

My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over.

It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.

Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry – yours and mine – back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

Could that have been what happened to the human race – a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past – except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.

I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time , while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species.