Mostem > Mostem's Quotes

“The low-entropy entities decreased their entropy and increased their order, like columns of phosphorescence rising over the inky-dark sea. This was meaning, the highest meaning, higher than enjoyment.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“Make time for civilization, for civilization won't make time.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“You must know that a person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Staying alive is not enough to guarantee survival. Development is the best way to ensure survival.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.”
― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of
physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic (Illustrated Edition): The Greatest Adventure Story Ever Told

“Of all their enemies -- the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“Fortitudine vincimus—“By endurance we conquer.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

“Mere existence is already the result of incredible luck. Such was the case on Earth in the past, and such has always been the case in this cruel universe. But at some point, humanity began to develop the illusion that they’re entitled to life, that life can be taken for granted.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Death is the only lighthouse that is always lit. No matter where you sail, ultimately, you must turn toward it. Everything fades in the world, but Death endures.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Everything was deathly quiet. The eyes were the most terrifying: the eyes of dinosaurus; the eyes of trilobites and ants; the eyes of birds and butterflies; the eyes of bacteria... The humans alone possessed one hundred billion pairs of eyes, equal to the number of stars in the Milky Way, Among them were the eyes of ordinary men and women, and the eyes of Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Einstein.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“we take our victories where we find them, and accept our defeats with grace and patience.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Inhibitor Phase