Gene Wolfe Quotes

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

I am not quite myself, I think.But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose.

What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.

I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

It is not humility to underrate yourself. Humility is to think of yourself as God thinks of you. It is to feel that if we have talents God has given them to us. And let it be seen that, like freight in a vessel, they tend to sink us low. The more we have, the lower we ought to lie.

You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.

I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

Self-righteousness is unavoidable. You can either be a self-righteous Pharisee where you think you are better than everyone else or you can be a self-righteous pagan who thinks you are better than the Pharisee. If you are a self-righteous person, I could become very self-righteous thinking that you're self-righteous and you think you're so good but I know you're bad. I know I'm bad so that makes me better than you.

I want to be aware of how I treat others, not thinking too highly of myself to be a servant in a culture which tries to place me on a throne that only God should sit.

Don't you think I have sense enough to worry about my motives for saying the prayer? That's exactly what's bothering me so. Just because I'm choosy about what I want - in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead or money or prestige or game or any of those things, doesn't mean I'm not as egotistical and self-seeking as everybody else. If anything, I'm more so!

I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.

Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power.

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and funny, but I'm not very clever and not terribly funny. I've finally accepted my limits, and I do what I can do.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

There's this belief that some things can be taken seriously in an intellectual way, while some things are only entertainment or only a commodity. Or there's some kind of critical consensus that some things are "good," and some things are garbage, throwaway culture. And I think the difference between them, in a lot of ways, is actually much less than people think. Especially when you get down to how they affect the audience.

Which means that in order to defeat her, I have to think of a way to defeat myself. And how can I be a better fighter than myself, if she knows the same strategies I know, and is exactly as resourceful and clever as I am?

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

Audiences - they like colour, you know. I can go out there wearing a red suit, man, and they'll say I'm out of sight ... I think they should be educated; you should always drop something on an audience ... When you get in front of an audience, you should try to give 'em something. After all, they're there looking at you like this. You can't go out and give 'em nothing.