Top 450 Arthur C. Clarke Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I’d hate to do arithmetic, George thought to himself, in a system based on fourteen.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

352. “And there still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of Love and Art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with Love.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

353. “Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

354. “I hope you’re right. Apart from that, won’t there be trouble when he discovers what you’re trying to do? Because he will, you know.” “I’ll take that risk. Besides, we understand each other rather well.” The physicist toyed with his pencil and stared into space for a while. “It’s a very pretty problem. I like it,” he said simply. Then he dived into a drawer and produced an enormous writing pad, quite the biggest that Stormgren had ever seen.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

355. “So the problem of Evil never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

356. “He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label – SPACETASTIES – was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed underneath: ‘Guaranteed crumbless’.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

357. “Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

358. “It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers a second. Anything like a regular schedule is out of the question; there are times when one must forget the whole idea and stay in port – or at least in orbit – waiting for the Solar System to rearrange itself for the greater convenience of Mankind.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

359. “It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

360. “Pat’s knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

361. “It was fascinating to watch that agile mind trying one opening after another, testing and rejecting all the theories that Stormgren himself had abandoned long ago.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

362. “I agree with you, Captain,” he whispered. “The human race has to live with its conscience. Whatever the Hermians argue, survival is not everything.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

363. “There’s an ancient philosophical joke that’s much subtler than it seems. Question: Why is the Universe here? Answer: Where else would it be?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

364. “For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

365. “When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

366. “I’m a tone-deaf siren, a wallflower at the mating dance. And I do wonder why men can’t want me for me. I’m smart, I don’t defer, and I didn’t put making babies number one on my list of priorities.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

367. “Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

368. “Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

369. “Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

370. “And as for the Council – tell it that a road that has once been opened cannot be closed again merely by passing a resolution.’ The.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

371. “Tom hated to admit defeat, even in matters far less important than this. He believed that all problems could be solved if they were tackled in the right way, with the right equipment. This was a challenge to his scientific ingenuity; the fact that there were many lives involved was immaterial. Dr. Tom Lawson had no great use for human beings, but he did respect the Universe. This was a private fight between him and It.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

372. “Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

373. “She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it’s not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measure good or bad mental health.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

374. “This hydrogen was under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

375. “Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

376. “President of the Society for Creative Anachronisms.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

377. “Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

378. “Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

379. “He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

380. “The room you are about to enter,” the Eagle said, setting up Nicole’s wheelchair, “is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a model of the Milky Way Galaxy.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

381. “The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

382. “Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness – the world of the desert – the world of the Invaders.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

383. “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.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

384. “But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

385. “No one worried except a few philosophers. The race was too intent upon savoring its new-found freedom to look beyond the pleasures of the present. Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias – boredom. Perhaps.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

386. “I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

387. “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

388. “That’s still looking a long way ahead. For the present, you’re the only person who should attempt communication. Agreed, Captain?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

389. “Long ago it had been discovered that without some crime or disorder, Utopia soon became unbearably dull.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

390. “How I envy them,” said Colonel Jones. “Sometimes it’s quite a relief to have something trivial to worry about.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

391. “Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

392. “Men had sought beauty in many forms – in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. All these media still survived in Diaspar and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered, or if it had any meaning outside the mind of Man. And the same was true of love.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

393. “Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

394. “One hemisphere was a giant bull’s-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

395. “I thought this couldn’t happen in astronomy. Isn’t celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

396. “CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

397. “Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

398. “I’ve just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction – they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary.”

— Arthur C. Clarke

399. “I said nothing about men adapting themselves to Mars. Have you ever considered the possibility of Mars meeting us half-way?”

— Arthur C. Clarke

400. “No single individual, however eccentric or brilliant, could affect the enormous inertia of a society that had remained virtually unchanged for over a billion years.”

— Arthur C. Clarke