The Fountains of Paradise

by Arthur C. Clarke

Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.

It had put an end to the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.

Rajasinghe felt that he could understand at last the meaning of nirvana—that state which can be defined only by negatives. Such emotions as anger, desire, greed no longer possessed any power; indeed, they were barely conceivable. Even the sense of personal identity seemed about to fade away, like a mist before the morning sun.

Design Section’s idea—nineteenth-century Pullman decor?” “Not much. Pullman cars didn’t have five circular floors, one on top of the other.” “Better tell Design that. They’ve set their hearts on gaslighting.”

Rolt’s classic biography Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Leafing through the well-thumbed pages, he quickly found the item that had stirred his memory. Brunel had planned a railway tunnel almost three kilometers long—a “monstrous and extraordinary, most dangerous and impracticable” concept. It was inconceivable, said the critics, that human beings

Starglider is generally credited with the famous aphorism ‘Belief in God is apparently a psychological arti-fact of mammalian reproduction.’

There was a brief silence before Kingsley spoke again, in the sort of tone one used to address a small child or a difficult invalid.

he showed that he knew they knew—all without a word being uttered, in the kind of psychological infinite regress that occurs when a group of people shares completely a secret that nobody will ever mention again.