Quotes from Arthur C. Clarke

The only way to define your limits is by going beyond them.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn't come here. Well, it can't hide forever - one day we will overhear it.

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past.

The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.

I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.

I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the 'dark ages'!

The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.

We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn't. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet's random geological savagery.

I doubt if there is a single field of study so theoretical, so remote from what is laughingly called everyday life, that it may not one day produce something that will shake the world.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence. [Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here. [IRC discussion at Scifi.com, 1 November 1996]

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading manuals without the software.

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

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.