The unknown - 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!

How do you attack the unknown, or defend yourself from it?

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

All unknowns are organically inimical to man, and homo sapiens is human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free of question marks.

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

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered.

- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)

As for the Half World - How can I describe a place that has no single matching criterion with what I have known? How can I speak of things for which no words have been invented? [. . .] All I can hope to do is tell how matters affected my human senses, how events influenced my human emotions, knowing that there are two falsehoods involved - the falsehood I saw and felt, and the falsehood that I tell.

- Robert A. Heinlein, ''Magic, Inc.'' (1940)

The unknown is a terrible place. There are monsters out there.

- Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery (1955)

The exploration of the unknown is always a fraud.

- James Gunn, Station in Space (1958)

There are people who run at the sight of the unknown, others who advance to meet it.

- Fredric Brown, ''Puppet Show'' (1962)

The unknown is always worse than the known.

- Eando Binder, Menace of the Saucers (1969)

''The unknown,'' said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, ''the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. [. . .] The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.''

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

He knew the unknown. It was beyond all comprehension and Guy thought that it was no more than a set of words: a black, emptyWorld preceding the appearance of theWorld Light; a dead, icyWorld when theWorld Light was extinguished; an endlessWasteland with manyWorld Lights. No one could explain what this meant.

- Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Prisoners of Power (1969), translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson (1977)

To rabbits, everything unknown is dangerous.

- Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972)

The Sioux had outlived their way of life, had turned it over to the white technicians, who would map everything. That was what he most disliked about them: that they sought to know all things, and did not realize that a forest without dark places has value only to the woodcutter.

- Jack McDevitt, Ancient Shores (1996)