104 Quotes by Clifford D. Simak

Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists.

Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over. It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species. Further than this, there should be no economic necessity of its doing so. By the time it was able to go into deep space, it must have arrived at an energy source which would not be based on planetary natural resources.

When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe.

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose