“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
45 likes
Author detail
Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942. During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948. He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards.
Quotes
Showing 1-20 of 80
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
45 likes
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
0 likes
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
3 likes
“Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.”
0 likes
“When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I'm writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.”
0 likes
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”
1 likes
“Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the f...”
2 likes
“All evil is good become cancerous.”
0 likes
“It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.”
0 likes
“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
0 likes
“Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.”
0 likes
“My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad job that he isn't worth discussing.”
0 likes
“Above all, never think you're not good enough. Never think that. In life people will take you at your own reckoning.”
0 likes
“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know—and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains...”
0 likes
“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.”
1 likes
“Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become...”
“No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists.”
“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.”
0 likes
“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And i...”
0 likes