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1 " Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. "
― Isaac Asimov
2 " The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit. "
3 " Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. "
― Isaac Asimov , Foundation (Foundation, #1)
4 " It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly. "
5 " If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. "
6 " Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. "
7 " Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments. "
8 " My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad jobthat he isn't worth discussing. "
9 " Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know—even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction—than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too. "
10 " Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young. "
― Isaac Asimov , Pebble in the Sky (Galactic Empire #3)
11 " Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning. "
12 " I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. "
13 " Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. "
― Isaac Asimov , The Roving Mind
14 " You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist. "
15 " It's the writing that teaches you. "
16 " Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. "
17 " I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time. "
18 " To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today. "
19 " I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so. "
― Isaac Asimov , I. Asimov: A Memoir
20 " I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. "
