Top 120 Ted Chiang Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”

— Ted Chiang

2. “Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”

— Ted Chiang

3. “Verba volant, scripta manent. In Tiv you would say, ‘Spoken words fly away, written words remain.”

— Ted Chiang

4. “Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment.”

— Ted Chiang

5. “Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.”

— Ted Chiang

6. “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”

— Ted Chiang

7. “Sometimes, it’s good to wait. The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there.”

— Ted Chiang

8. “People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.”

— Ted Chiang

9. “Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

— Ted Chiang

10. “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

— Ted Chiang

11. “It is no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.”

— Ted Chiang

12. “From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?”

— Ted Chiang

13. “If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?”

— Ted Chiang

14. “I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology.”

— Ted Chiang

15. “We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.”

— Ted Chiang

16. “Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of the graveyard.”

— Ted Chiang

17. “Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are.”

— Ted Chiang

18. “Low expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we aim high, we’ll get better results.”

— Ted Chiang

19. “Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully.”

— Ted Chiang

20. “And God sent him to Hell anyway.”

— Ted Chiang

21. “It’s funny: when you’re tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I’d insist that they include the halo. But when you’re unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.”

— Ted Chiang

22. “Dividing a number by zero doesn’t produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally “undefined.” 1A.”

— Ted Chiang

23. “Science fiction is about using speculative scenarios as a lens to examine the human condition.”

— Ted Chiang

24. “He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane. For him the mystery was solved, because he understood that everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain.”

— Ted Chiang

25. “Edgar Allan Poe had used the phrase “the imp of the perverse” to describe the temptation to do the wrong thing simply because you could, and for many people the imp had become more persuasive.”

— Ted Chiang

26. “Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.”

— Ted Chiang

27. “The Fermi Paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet. Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.”

— Ted Chiang

28. “None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.”

— Ted Chiang

29. “I concede his greater ingenuity. It bodes well for his endeavor. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism. I wonder what he intends to do after he’s saved the world. I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.”

— Ted Chiang

30. “My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

— Ted Chiang

31. “True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, and that’s something that nothing can obscure.”

— Ted Chiang

32. “The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one’s eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.”

— Ted Chiang

33. “The hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.”

— Ted Chiang

34. “Ease of learning isn’t the primary force in language evolution.”

— Ted Chiang

35. “You, I hope, are one of those explorers. You, I hope, found these sheets of copper and deciphered the words engraved on their surfaces. And whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.”

— Ted Chiang

36. “Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don’t matter. There’s no technological shortcut.”

— Ted Chiang

37. “It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one’s body is a mental activity.”

— Ted Chiang

38. “Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.”

— Ted Chiang

39. “I’m not sure if I’m ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, “Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up they blame me for everything that’s wrong with their lives?” She laughed and said “What do you mean if?”

— Ted Chiang

40. “Beauty is the promise of happiness.” – Stendhal.”

— Ted Chiang

41. “At that stage of your life, there’ll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you’ll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you’ll perceive; you’ll live in the present tense. In many ways, it’s an enviable state.”

— Ted Chiang

42. “And then it came to him: a seal cylinder. When rolled upon a tablet of soft clay, the carved cylinder left an imprint that formed a picture. Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder. All the world was as such a cylinder. Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched. It.”

— Ted Chiang

43. “In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It’s this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.”

— Ted Chiang

44. “The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I’m glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.”

— Ted Chiang

45. “She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe.”

— Ted Chiang

46. “I’ve gone into the outside world to reobserve society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do. At.”

— Ted Chiang

47. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because it helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”

— Ted Chiang

48. “The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do. At.”

— Ted Chiang

49. “Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can’t liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences.”

— Ted Chiang

50. “Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can’t liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences. That’s positively Orwellian. What’s needed is a woman-centered concept of beauty, one that lets all women feel good about themselves instead of making most of them feel bad.”

— Ted Chiang