Robert Silverberg: Quotes about space

Robert Silverberg is American speculative fiction writer and editor. Explore interesting quotes on universe.
Robert Silverberg: 176 quotes0 likes

“The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 12, section 4 (p. 179)

“I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 13-14)

“They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 76)

“You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 6, section 8 (p. 89)

““I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”
“It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?”
“You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.”
“You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?”
Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.””

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 72)

“The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.”
“You mean us?”
“Yes. Enemies.” Muller’s eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. “Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!”
“You say it as if you believe it.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

“I do.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 118)

“In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 3 (p. 11)

“We are born by accident into a purely random universe.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 1, (p. 1; opening words)

“I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.”
“Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?”
“There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.”
“We have no freedom at all?”
“The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.”
“Have you felt this way all your life?”
“Most of it,” Boardman said.
“When you were my age?”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

“Even earlier.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 73)

“Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?”
“The Divine—”
“Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.””

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 5 “The Book of the Castle”, Chapter 4 (pp. 424-425)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)