Jack Vance Quotes

"Here you see the pattern from which my great work is derived. It expresses the symbolic significance of NULLITY to which TOTALITY must necessarily attach itself, by Kratinjae's Second Law of Cryptorrhoid Affinities, with which you are possibly familiar."
"Not in every aspect," said Cugel.

Banish Evil from the world? Nonsense! Encourage it, foster it, sponsor it. The world owes Evil a debt beyond imagination. Think! Without greed ambition falters. Without vanity art becomes idle musing. Without cruelty benevolence lapses to passivity. Superstition has shamed man into self-reliance and, without stupidity, where would be the savor of superior understanding?

A notable scheme has occurred to me.

Motto of the Institute: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; a great deal of knowledge is disaster, which detractors of the Institute scornfully paraphrase to: Somebody else’s ignorance is bliss.

Events rush together. History occurs.

“You drink only sparingly. Is the beer too thin?”
“No at all. I merely wish to keep my wits about me. It would not do if both of us became addled, and later woke up in doubt as to who was who.”

“I learned a great deal,” said Beran. “And then I lost all heart for further learning.”
Palafox’s eyes glinted. “Education is not achieved through the heart—it is a systematization of the mental processes.”
“But I am something other than a mental process,” said Beran. “I am a man. I must reckon with the whole of myself.”

Aillas replied that while King Audry cited several points of technical interest, and used the resources of abstract logic in an adroit manner, he had actually made no connection with reality.

Shanne said, “You are quiet; are you sad?”
“In a way. Do you know why?”
She put her hand across his mouth. “Never speak of it. What must be, will be. What can never be—can never be.”
Ghyl turned to look at her, trying to divine every last scintilla of her meaning.
“But,” she added in a soft voice, “what can be—can be.”

If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another’s mind.

The central problem, so it seemed, was to learn from whose eye he looked forth. Much, after all, would depend upon his viewpoint.

Aillas groaned. “Destiny could never be so unkind.”
Suldrun said in a soft voice: “Destiny doesn’t really care.”

“The problems are large,” Reith agreed. “Still, assuming that your premise is correct—”
“‘Assume’? ‘Premise’?” demanded the fat woman in a shocked voice. ‘Revelation,’ rather.”
“Possibly so. But mysticism is not a practical approach to space travel.”

Kings, like children, tend to be opportunistic. Generosity only spoils them. They equate affability with weakness and hasten to exploit it.

When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.