Jack Vance: Man

Jack Vance was American mystery and speculative fiction writer. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Jack Vance: 426 quotes3 likes

“There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.”

Jack Vance book The Languages of Pao

Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 133)

““Are you yourself a Christian?”
The young man made a negative sign. “The concepts of religion baffle me.”
“This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,” said the ex-priest. “It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.””

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 1, section 4 (p. 367)

““I learned a great deal,” said Beran. “And then I lost all heart for further learning.”
Palafox’s eyes glinted. “Education is not achieved through the heart—it is a systematization of the mental processes.”
“But I am something other than a mental process,” said Beran. “I am a man. I must reckon with the whole of myself.””

Jack Vance book The Languages of Pao

Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 133)

“Speaking our language, you will understand us—and if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him.”

Jack Vance book The Languages of Pao

Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 8 (p. 64)

“Humanity is old, civilization is new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth—and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort…. We of the Institute receive an intensive historical inculcation; we know the men of the past, and we have projected dozens of possible future variations, which, without exception, are repulsive. Man, as he exists now, with all his faults and vices, a thousand gloriously irrational compromises between two thousand sterile absolute—is optimal. Or so it seems to us who are men.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Killing Machine (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 179)

“"Llorio, you are a woman of surpassing beauty, though you would seem to lack that provocative warmth which draws man to woman, and adds dimension to the character."
The Murthe responded curtly: "The quality you describe is a kind of lewd obsequiousness which, happily, has now become obsolete. As for the 'surpassing beauty,' it is an apotheotic quality generated by the surging music of the female soul, which you, in your crassness, perceive only as a set of pleasing contours."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"The Murthe", chapter 3
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

“It is simple dog-eat-dog,” said Waylock. It’s basic battle for survival, fiercer and more brutal than ever before in the history of man. You have blinded yourself; you subscribe to false theories; you are permeated with your obsession—not only you but all of us. If we faced the facts of existence, our palliatories would be less crowded.”

Jack Vance book To Live Forever

Source: To Live Forever (1956), Chapter XI, section 2

“"A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asseverate the structure and history of the entire universe!"
Bah!" muttered Hurtiancz. "By the same token, a sensible man need listen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense."”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984), "Morreion", Ch. 8

“Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind, and rain. Now this creature is suddenly--on the geologic scale, instantaneously--shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little.”

Section 5 (p. 177)
Short fiction, Rumfuddle (1973)

“Man had dominated the Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause. Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment.
He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool.”

Infinity Science Fiction (July 1957)
Short fiction, The Men Return (1957)

“I watch the sea and the sky; sometimes I wade in the surf and build roads in the sand. At night I study the stars.”
“You have no friends?”
“No.”
“And what of the future?”
“The future stops at ‘now’.”
“As to that, I am not so sure,” said Shimrod. “It is at best a half-truth.”
“What of that? Half a truth is better than none: do you not agree?”
“Not altogether,” said Shimrod. “I am a practical man, I try to control the shape of the ‘nows’ which lie in the offing, instead of submitting to them as they occur.”
Melancthe gave an uninterested shrug. “You are free to do as you like.” Leaning back in the divan, she looked out across the sea.
Shimrod finally spoke. “Well then: are you ‘good’ or ‘bad’?”
“I don’t know.”
Shimrod became vexed. “Talking with you is like visiting an empty house.”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Melancthe considered a moment before responding. “Perhaps,” she said, “you are visiting the wrong house. Or perhaps you are the wrong visitor.”
Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Madouc (1989), Chapter 5, section 4 (p. 783)

“The history of man is a compendium of such evil. We are an evolutionary product, descendants of predators. A few synthetic foods aside, every morsel eaten by man is taken from another living thing. We are intended for murder; we kill to exist!”

Jack Vance book To Live Forever

Source: To Live Forever (1956), Chapter XII, section 4

“I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.”

Jack Vance book The Last Castle

Source: The Last Castle (1966), Chapter 3, section 2

“A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain…. The solution is not splicing the rope; it’s lessening the tension.”

Jack Vance book To Live Forever

Source: To Live Forever (1956), Chapter XVI, section 3

“I am an unhappy man. I am haunted by my inability to express the inexpressible, to come to terms with the unknown. The pursuit of beauty is, of course, a major psychological drive. It its various guises—which is to say, the urge to perfection, the yearning to merge with the eternal, the explorer’s restlessness, the realization of an Absolute created by ourselves, yet larger than our totality—it is perhaps the most important human thrust.”

Jack Vance Demon Princes

Source: Demon Princes (1964-1981), The Palace of Love (1967), Chapter 6 (p. 346)

“Gambling, in the ultimate study, stems from the passive, the submissive, the irresponsible in human nature; the gambler is one of an inferior lickspittle breed who turns himself belly-upward to the capricious deeds of Luck. Examine now the man of strength and action: he is never led by destiny. He drives on a decided course, manipulates the variables, and instead of submitting to the ordained shape of his life, creates a pattern to his own design.”

Startling Stories (September 1948), p. 113
Short fiction, Sanatoris Short-Cut (1948)

“Banish Evil from the world? Nonsense! Encourage it, foster it, sponsor it. The world owes Evil a debt beyond imagination. Think! Without greed ambition falters. Without vanity art becomes idle musing. Without cruelty benevolence lapses to passivity. Superstition has shamed man into self-reliance and, without stupidity, where would be the savor of superior understanding?”

Jack Vance book The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph

The Sub-Standard Sardines (p. 132)
Short fiction, The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph (1966)