Top 15 David Zindell Quotes

You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.

The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost. "The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being." "Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow." "About some things there is no other way to speak."

In an infinite universe, every point in space-time is the center.

The elite of the universal religions have always substituted belief in the Infinite for the experience of it. We all need God — but only in small and measured doses. Who can look upon the burning bush and not be destroyed in its flames? Who can bear the heaven and hell of each moment blazing in time? Who can shine like a star? And so, for all but a few of the manswarm, the rare ones who are truly human, it is better to glimpse such a miracle through a dark glass or to grasp it through words only.

The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god.

Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made.

That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.

For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.

This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself.

Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love.

For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.

All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.

But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever...

Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?

In time, the heart of each religion grows hard and dies. And so seekers of the godly will always turn to new prophets and new ways, never realizing that, ultimately, all religions separate man from God.