Robert Silverberg Quotes

What value is lineage to a drowning man?

Love of others begins with love of self.

Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul.

All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.

The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice.

How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!

But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank.

You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.

It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.

But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition.

She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better, as though she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his, but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He’s a man, she’s a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is façade.

Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you.

What counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day.

When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?

Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy.