168 Quotes by Ted Chiang

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.

Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our natures? And that, you have to agree, is a profound question.

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.

..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.

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

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduce to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

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.

I remember when you'll be a month old, and I'll stumble out of bed to give you your 2:00 a.m. feeding.

men of experience say, "Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.