Quotes by "Isaac Asimov"

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life. [Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]

All evil is good become cancerous.

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn't worth discussing.

Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know—even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction—than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.