Quote

How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real.

Jack Vance

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Jack Vance
Age: 96 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 2013
Died: May 26
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
San Francisco County
California
John Holbrook Vance
Jack Vance
John H. Vance
Relative
Uncertainty
Formulations
Ease
Uncertainties
Absolutes
Undeniable
Real
Orthodoxy
Good
Facility
Uncertain
Denied

More quotes by Jack Vance

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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
Jack Vance
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Truth is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
Jack Vance
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
Jack Vance
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I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.
Jack Vance
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Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.
Jack Vance
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This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.
Jack Vance
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The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.
Jack Vance
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Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.
Jack Vance
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Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party whether he realizes it or not must always come out the worse.
Jack Vance
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
Jack Vance
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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
Jack Vance
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
Jack Vance
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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
Jack Vance
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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
Jack Vance
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Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.
Jack Vance
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Notice this rent in my garment I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.
Jack Vance
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I must cite an intrinsic condition of the universe. We set forth in any direction which seems convenient each leads to the same place: the end of the universe.
Jack Vance
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Good music always defeats bad luck
Jack Vance
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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
Jack Vance
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
Jack Vance