Happiness and sadness - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

While his heart still beats, while his flesh still moves, I cannot accept that a being endowed with will-power can give in to despair.

- Jules Verne, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), translated by William Butcher (1992)

Despair has its own calms.

- Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

''I shall take the heart,'' returned the TinWoodman; ''for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.''

- L. Frank Baum, TheWonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

- George Bernard Shaw,Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (play, 1903)

You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficial yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

They'll cure you, they'll stuff you full of rich, fat happiness, and, sated, you will doze off peacefully, snoring in perfect unison - don't you hear that mighty symphony of snores? Ridiculous people! They want to free you of every squirming, torturing, nagging question mark.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

Earthling, it strikes me that the ancient wisdom of our race is faulty. Although we are in every way superior to you, in your puny, shortlived bodies is something that we have not. Something finer. Something that we can no more imagine than you can imagine the color of ultra-violet which does not affect your eyes.What is happiness?

- R. F. Starzl, ''The Planet of Despair'' (1931)

That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

No news, he thought, makes a happy country but a dull breakfast.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (1942)

He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1954)

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

- Aldous Huxley, ''Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow'' (1956)

''Did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate those natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God's Machineries of Joy?'' ''If Blake said that,'' said Father Brian, ''I take it all back. He never lived in Dublin!''

- Ray Bradbury ''The Machineries of Joy'' (1962)

He was, perhaps like DinoWatters, addicted to gloom. She felt sorry for him if that were so. It was a terrible malady to have.

- Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

If truly ghosts haunt the scenes of tragedy and heartbreak, then the landscape of Old Earth must be home to ghosts and specters beyond all numbering.

- Jack Vance, ''The Last Castle'' (1966)

Isn't the measure of complexity the measure of the eternal joy?

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Vaster Than Empires and More Slow'' (1971)

Though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972)

Even pleasure, infinitely exquisite, infinitely realizable, becomes infinitely tedious.

- Robin Scott Wilson, ''Last Train to Kankakee'' (1972)

We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. [. . .] Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The OnesWhoWalk Away from Omelas'' (1973)

There's no crime in giving yourself over to pleasure - is there?

- Richard O'Brien, The Rocky Horror Show (play, 1973)

A real sense of triumph must be preceded by real despair. She had unlearned despair a long time ago. There were no more triumphs. One went on.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The Day Before the Revolution'' (1974)

Rain is a sad thing, to the human psyche. It is that, that sadness, perhaps because it recalls to unhappy people their own tears, that palliates melancholy.

- GeneWolfe, ''The Death of Doctor Island'' (1974)

In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

It was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)

''Doing what you must do is what living is all about'' cried Amy in astonishment. ''That's the perfect joy of existence!''

- IanWatson, ''Cruising'' (1983)

Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair - an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.

- Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (1987)

The secret of happiness in life is to know what you are and then be content to be that, in style, head up and proud, and not yearn to be something else. Ambition can never change a sparrow into a hawk, or a wren into a bird of paradise.

- Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail beyond the Sunset (1987)

It's good to have things to regret, though, isn't it? I'm sure it's an essential part of being human.

- Greg Egan, ''The Cutie'' (1989)

''We must live on into the new age with the spoils of our victory over evil. You with your burned child, and I with nothing at all.'' Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990)

Grief runs off us, Michel thought as he sat with her, like rain off a duck. In time Nadia would be well.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)

What happened to ''and they lived happily ever after?'' It's stuck at the end of tales in stupid Guild ballads, that's what happened to it. Real people get stuck in potholes, not platitudes.

- Mercedes Lackey, The Robin and the Kestrel (1993)

You accumulate grief as you go through life, and it can make you bitter, empty, cold, or wise.

- Tara K. Harper, Grayheart (1996)