Robert Silverberg quotes - page 2

May I be struck dead for saying this if I don't mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We've had enough religion for one season. (Robert Silverberg)
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. View quote
Robert Silverberg
As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational. View quote
Robert Silverberg
My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles. View quote
Robert Silverberg
My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as-as playing chess. View quote
Robert Silverberg
How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another! View quote
Robert Silverberg
It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting. View quote
Robert Silverberg
It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies. View quote
Robert Silverberg
The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant. View quote
Robert Silverberg
They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct. (Robert Silverberg)
It's not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It's an accommodation to the nature of reality. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power. View quote
Robert Silverberg
You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams. View quote
Robert Silverberg
I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Come,” Deliamber said. "There is a vast journey ahead of us.” "I know. That's why I don't want to get up. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul. View quote
Robert Silverberg
He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for...although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love. View quote
Robert Silverberg
Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers. View quote
Robert Silverberg
They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins. View quote
Robert Silverberg
When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don't boast about it afterward to the victim! (Robert Silverberg)
You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly. View quote
Robert Silverberg
"You speak very generally,” Valentine said. "I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly. View quote
Robert Silverberg
He didn't have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer. View quote
Robert Silverberg
But why?” he asked Deliamber. The Vroon replied, "Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress. View quote
Robert Silverberg