Liu Cixin Quotes

Hide yourself well; cleanse well.

The cosmos had not chosen humanity after all. In the old timeline, humans had created the apex civilization on earth, but that had been a one-time and accidental chance. In our human conceit, we’d taken the accidental for the inevitable.

Quantitative change eventually gives way to qualitative change.

Right then, at the frequency of 12000 MHz, the sun was the brightest star in the entire Milky Way.

To love humanity, you must start by loving individual persons, by fulfilling your responsibility to those you love.

It’s easy to make ideological mistakes in theory.

The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than more base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose. Mountains are universal and we are all standing at the feet of mountains.

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers.

I don’t have much to say except a warning. Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine.

The entire empire has sunk into a quagmire of extravagance from which they cannot extricate themselves.

Everyone likes to reminisce, but no one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big bang, all matter existed in the form of light, and only after the universe turned to burnt ash did heavier elements precipitate out of the darkness and form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and of civilization. On Earth, an avalanche of curses and abuse rolled out into space toward Blue Space and Bronze Age, but the two ships made no reply. They cut off all contact with the Solar System, for to those two worlds, the Earth was already dead. The two dark ships became one with the darkness, separated by the Solar System and drifting further apart. Carrying with them the entirety of human thoughts and memories, and embracing all of the Earth’s glory and dreams, they quietly disappeared into the eternal night.

Beauty is always paired with good,

when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation.

The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper — or, at least, neutral — act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?