Philip Jose Farmer Quotes

Sawbeaked epitome of bodiless Idea, tossed by gusts of ether, dive Through abstract mists and raid the sea of fact Eat rich strange fish, grow long bright feathers, press Form's flesh around thought's rib, and so derive From the act of beauty, beauty of the act.

Burton did not believe in miracles . Nothing happened that could not be explained by physical principles if you knew all the facts .

Call me Meier, Goring said, but he did not pause to explain the joke .

The stars above will be below when man has Love.

Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
The tender alcoves built by love at night.

Reader, pray that soon this Iron Age Will crumble, and Beauty escape the rusting cage.

I seldom lie,' he said.

Purgatory is hell with hope.

The ideal was the light; the real, the shadow.

Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.

There are Universes begging for Gods, yet he hangs around this one looking for work.

It's a peculiarity of the Norwegian culture and of the English and American, too, that men are not supposed to cry. Stiff upper lip and all that. But the Vikings cried like women in public or privately. They soaked their beards with tears and were not one bit ashamed about it. Yet, they were as quick to draw their swords as they were to shed tears. So, what's all this crap about men having to hold in their sorrow and grief and disappointment?

All the human beings I met were either sure that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get preferential treatment in the hereafter.

Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself .

Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum.

Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.

Dreams haunted The Riverworld.

Caught Beauty , held to light, now apes A good, now evil, thing the shifting sign And spectrum of archaic, psychic shapes.

Know a man's faith, and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

Now we have lit a candle to the power Of atoms; now we know we're heirs of light Itself ...

Beauty in this Iron Age must turn From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn Who hopes to wake the Future to arise In Phoenix -fashion, and to shine with rays To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes Of selfishness and lust have stained our days ...

By this he meant that all events, therefore, all men, are interconnected in an unbreakable web. What man does, no matter how seemingly insignificant, vibrates through the strands and affects every man.

Give us power, give us light To holdall love within our breast's small space.

One thing is sure, O comrades, that the love
That fights to keep us rooted in the earth,
But also urges us to dare the stars,
This irresistible, this ancient power
Wedged in the soul, unshakable, is the light
That burns our roots and leaves us free for Space.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book.

Strong blasphemers thrive only when strong believers thrive.

Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It's impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.

Actually, the situation was intolerable. But then it was surprising how much intolerableness a man could tolerate.

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

The way is open, comrades, free as Space
Alone is free. The only gold is love,
A coin that we have minted from the light
Of others who have cared for us on Earth
And who have deposited in us the power
That nerves our nerves to seize the burning stars.

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.

Let those who think the soul is shallow rail, They must be warned before they dare to leap They'll plunge into the twilight depths where sweep In ceaseless thirst great teeth too swift to fail.

You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.