Philip Jose Farmer Quotes

Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself .

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.

The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

Tomorrow changes the face of reality.

It was a shameful thing that she had nothing of which to be ashamed.

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.

Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.

The stars above will be below when man has Love.

This story is about love, which means that it is also about hate.

The way is open, comrades, free as Space Alone is free. The only gold is love, A coin that we have minted from the light Of others who have cared for us on Earth And who have deposited in us the power That nerves our nerves to seize the burning stars.

Nature is an experimenter.

There are Universes begging for Gods, yet he hangs around this one looking for work.

Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.

All the human beings I met were either sure that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get preferential treatment in the hereafter.

Burton did not believe in miracles . Nothing happened that could not be explained by physical principles if you knew all the facts .

Dullard: Someone who looks up a thing in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book.

Burton, though an infidel, made it his business to investigate thoroughly every religion. Know a man's faith , and you knew at least half the man. Know his wife, and you knew the other half.

It's a peculiarity of the Norwegian culture and of the English and American, too, that men are not supposed to cry. Stiff upper lip and all that. But the Vikings cried like women in public or privately. They soaked their beards with tears and were not one bit ashamed about it. Yet, they were as quick to draw their swords as they were to shed tears. So, what's all this crap about men having to hold in their sorrow and grief and disappointment?

Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It's impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.

The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.

Beauty in this Iron Age must turn, From fluid living rainbow shapes to torn, And sootened fragments, ashes in an urn, On whose gray surface runes are traced by a Norn, Who hopes to wake the Future to arise, In Phoenix-fashion, and to shine with rays, To blast the sight of modern men whose dyes, Of selfishness and lust have stained our days...

Strong blasphemers thrive only when strong believers thrive.

Give us power, give us light To holdall love within our breast's small space.

Now we have lit a candle to the power Of atoms; now we know we're heirs of light Itself.