Ray Bradbury: Meaningful Quotes

You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There's nothing magical in them at all. Magic is only what books mean, what books say. How they stitch the patterns of the universe together into one garment for us.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.
The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching.
The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.
As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it? It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out.
What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.

The universe... won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the furthest of the two!

... you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last.

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing.

It’s not every day you get a second chance.

It’s a world and we get a second chance.
Nobody told us why.
But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either.
That other Earth, I mean.
The one you came from.
How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?