Top 200 Liu Cixin Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “She was like a star, always so distant. Even the light she shone on me was always cold.”

— Liu Cixin

52. “Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.”

— Liu Cixin

53. “Exponentials are the devils of mathematics.”

— Liu Cixin

54. “Although the method is simple, it shows how, mathematically, random brute force can overcome precise logic. It’s a numerical approach that uses quantity to derive quality.”

— Liu Cixin

55. “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

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

— Liu Cixin

57. “The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical:.”

— Liu Cixin

58. “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

59. “But one always awoke from a dream, just like the sun – which, though it would rise again, brought no fresh hope.”

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

62. “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

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

— Liu Cixin

64. “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

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

— Liu Cixin

66. “Let’s go drinking and then go back to sleep like good bugs.”

— Liu Cixin

67. “Saving a species of bird or insect is no different from saving humankind. ‘All lives are equal’ is the basic tenet of Pan-Species Communism.”

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

69. “I’ve got to learn how to live. If I can’t swing that, it’ll be a damn shame,” Luo.”

— Liu Cixin

70. “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

71. “But from the perspective of aesthetics, I must be right and the universe must be wrong.”

— Liu Cixin

72. “It’s easy to be led to the abyss.”

— Liu Cixin

73. “The birth of a new civilization is the formation of a new morality.”

— Liu Cixin

74. “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

75. “I didn’t have a good impression of the tourists and pilgrims. The tourists had no idea what they were looking at, only running around to snap pictures.”

— Liu Cixin

76. “Right then, at the frequency of 12000 MHz, the sun was the brightest star in the entire Milky Way.”

— Liu Cixin

77. “The most conspicuous of the group was Zhu Hanyang, a software magnate whose Orient 3000 Operating System was replacing the outdated Microsoft Windows system all across the globe.”

— Liu Cixin

78. “She didn’t want to comment on the way things were – there was nothing worthwhile to say.”

— Liu Cixin

79. “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

80. “Now you know the goal of this game: to use our intellect and understanding to analyze all phenomena until we can know the pattern of the sun’s movement. The survival of civilization depends on it.”

— Liu Cixin

81. “It’s very interesting: The inside heats up first while the outside remains cold.”

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

83. “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

84. “I’m a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass.”

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

86. “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

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

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

89. “Keep the fire low.”

— Liu Cixin

90. “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

91. “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

92. “Mom, I’m going to be a firefly.”

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

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

— Liu Cixin

96. “Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!”

— Liu Cixin

97. “In China, any idea that dared to take flight would only crash back to the ground. The gravity of reality is too strong.”

— Liu Cixin

98. “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

99. “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

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

— Liu Cixin