Clifford D. Simak Quotes

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

It can't be Nature, for it is not sense.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.

Faith is not a rational thing, and yet to understand the universe, rationality alone will not give it to us. Our understanding of the universe must transcend the rational.

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

People are not stupid.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

There is a reason for everything.

My definition of an educated man is the fellow who knows the right thing to do at the time it has to be done. You can be sincere and still be stupid.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know what is forward, for while seeing is believing, it does not follow that either seeing or believing is knowing.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

Human beings understand too much.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.