Isaac Asimov
333 quotes
Biography
"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."
"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."
"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die."
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."
"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist."
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."
"Once, when a religionist denounced me in unmeasured terms, I sent him a card saying, "I am sure you believe that I will go to hell when I die, and that once there I will suffer all the pains and tortures the sadistic ingenuity of your deity can devise and that this torture will continue forever. Isn't that enough for you? Do you have to call me bad names in addition?"
"Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments."
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
"My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad jobthat he isn't worth discussing."
"I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so."
"The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit."
"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
"I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse."
"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for."
"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."
"In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile"
"Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning."
"Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one."(Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]"
"What would you consider a good job?"Answered as follows:"A good job is one in which I don't have to work, and get paid a lot of money."When I heard that I cheered and yelled and felt that he should be given an A+, for he had perfectly articulated the American dream of those who despise knowledge. What a politician that kid would have made."
"If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true."