The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.

What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they'd nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.

what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")

Explosions are not comfortable.