Top 200 Liu Cixin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If so, I’ll just hold the umbrella up for you forever.”

— Liu Cixin

52. “In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory.”

— Liu Cixin

53. “Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.”

— Liu Cixin

54. “Are you under the impression that the object of everyone else’s love actually exists?”

— Liu Cixin

55. “Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance.”

— Liu Cixin

56. “At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.”

— Liu Cixin

57. “Young people are all the same. The more books you read, the more confused you become.”

— Liu Cixin

58. “One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean.”

— Liu Cixin

59. “From the depths of his memory arose a tingling sadness, fragile and pure like morning dew, tinged with a rosy hue.”

— Liu Cixin

60. “Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?”

— Liu Cixin

61. “Life needed smoothness, but it also needed direction. One could not always be returning to the point of origin.”

— Liu Cixin

62. “The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard-issue People’s Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the “August Editorial”; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears.”

— Liu Cixin

63. “I read it when I was a kid. Shanghai’s about to fall into the ocean, and a group of people go house to house seizing life preservers and then destroying them en masse, for the sole purpose of making sure that no one would live if everyone couldn’t. I remember in particular there was one little girl who took the group to the door of one house and cried out, ‘They still have one!”

— Liu Cixin

64. “In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”

— Liu Cixin

65. “Everyone is afraid of something. The enemy must be, too. The more powerful they are, the more they have to lose to their fears.”

— Liu Cixin

66. “Each star was like a distant eye blinking at the human world from the depths of the universe.”

— Liu Cixin

67. “She was like a star, always so distant. Even the light she shone on me was always cold.”

— Liu Cixin

68. “He lacked the ability to thrive in society, but also the resources to ignore it. All he could do was hang on to the edge, suffering.”

— Liu Cixin

69. “Most people would have difficulty explaining how they know two and two make four.”

— Liu Cixin

70. “Keep the fire low.”

— Liu Cixin

71. “Now, faced with political cases like yours, all prosecutorial organs and courts would rather be too severe than too lax. This is because treating you too severely would just be a mistake in method, but treating you too laxly would be a mistake in political direction.”

— Liu Cixin

72. “Emancipation of human nature inevitably brings with it scientific and technological progress.”

— Liu Cixin

73. “In the invisible world, imagination and reality are the same thing. When something appears in your imagination, it becomes reality. Of course, as you said, reality in quantum memory is a collection of impulses. The people of this age are gradually transitioning to the invisible world, and more of them now live there than in the visible world. Even though a copy of the brain can be in both worlds, the invisible world is like a drug. No one wants to come back once they’ve experienced life there.”

— Liu Cixin

74. “As soon as we increase the dimensionality of this proton, it will become very small.”

— Liu Cixin

75. “Mom, I’m going to be a firefly.”

— Liu Cixin

76. “The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.”

— Liu Cixin

77. “A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.”

— Liu Cixin

78. “The physics principles behind the three-body problem28 are very simple. It’s mainly a math problem.”

— Liu Cixin

79. “Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!”

— Liu Cixin

80. “Unlike other human religions, they worshipped something that truly existed. Also unlike other human religions, it was the Lord who was in crisis, and the duty of salvation fell on the shoulders of the believer.”

— Liu Cixin

81. “Outside the ship, the thin membrane of space-time rippled with the gravitational waves, like a placid lake surface disturbed by a night breeze. The judgment of death for both worlds spread across the cosmos at the speed of light.”

— Liu Cixin

82. “That’s right. Five minutes into the all-hands meeting, the fundamental values of this totalitarian society had received the support of the vast majority of the crew. So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism. Boris.”

— Liu Cixin

83. “To work in fundamental theory, one must be stupid.”

— Liu Cixin

84. “During research conducted with the neuroscientist Keiko Yamasuki, he discovered that brain activity for thoughts and memories operated on the quantum level rather than on the molecular level as previously believed.”

— Liu Cixin

85. “If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?”

— Liu Cixin

86. “Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”

— Liu Cixin

87. “The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.”

— Liu Cixin

88. “The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without.”

— Liu Cixin

89. “We’ll send only a brain,” he said.”

— Liu Cixin

90. “The false alarm was the result of the explosive amplifying effects of a hyper-information society when fed sensitive news.”

— Liu Cixin

91. “I want to tell all those who believe in God that I am not the Chosen One. I also want to tell all the atheists that I am not a history-maker. I am but an ordinary person. Unfortunately, I have not been able to walk the ordinary person’s path. My path is, in reality, the journey of a civilization.”

— Liu Cixin

92. “By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”

— Liu Cixin

93. “You are standing at the foot of the mountain. We are all always at the foot. The speed of light is the foot of a mountain; the three dimensions of space are the foot of a mountain. You are imprisoned in the deep gorge of light-speed and three- dimensional space. Does it not feel... cramped?”

— Liu Cixin

94. “As he spoke, he looked up and once again saw Zhang Beihai’s steady gaze, which revealed a determination that warmed his heart a little. Zhang Beihai, I know you have faith. With a father like that, it would be impossible for you not to. But things are definitely not as simple as you say. I don’t know what you base your faith on, and I don’t even know what else your faith encompasses. Just like your father. I admired him, but I have to admit that in the end I couldn’t figure him out. Chang.”

— Liu Cixin

95. “The universe is a hollow sphere floating in the middle of a sea of fire. There are numerous tiny holes in the surface of the sphere, as well as a large one. The light from the sea of flames shines through these holes. The tiny ones are stars, and the large one is the sun.”

— Liu Cixin

96. “I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.”

— Liu Cixin

97. “The humanism of Earth will lead many Trisolarans onto the wrong path. Just as Trisolaran civilization has already become a religion on Earth, Earth civilization has this potential on Trisolaris.”

— Liu Cixin

98. “In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilization had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light.”

— Liu Cixin

99. “Earth was treated as a knowledge battery: After it was charged fully with Trisolaran knowledge, it would provide more power.”

— Liu Cixin

100. “The universal laws of physics are the most terrifying weapons, and also the most effective defenses.”

— Liu Cixin