“SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.”

“A bystander… remarked, '… One day of life is weightier than ten thousand pieces of gold…. It is not because they do not fear death, but because they forget the nearness of death that men do not rejoice in life. One may say that he has grasped the true principle who is unconcerned with the manifestation of life or death.' When he said this people scoffed at him more than ever.”

“Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.”

“He disrupted things and that’s fine, but now things have been shaken up so much that it’s been shaken up into little bits and the little bits have been shaken up into even smaller bits. We are saying let’s put it all back together.”

“I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”

“Some characteristic expressions he used rather frequently in everyday speech can be seen in letters in his own hand, in which he sometimes writes, when he wants to say that certain men will never pay: "they'll pay on the Greek Kalends." And when he wants to encourage his addressee to put up with present circumstances whatever they are, he says: "Let us be satisfied with the Cato we have."”
Cotidiano sermone quaedam frequentius et notabiliter usurpasse eum, litterae ipsius autographae ostentant, in quibus identidem, cum aliquos numquam soluturos significare vult, "ad Kalendas Graecas soluturos" ait; et cum hortatur ferenda esse praesentia, qualiacumque sint: "contenti simus hoc Catone".

“Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul.”

“The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.
Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.”

“How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?”

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”