The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

by Liu Cixin

“In China, any idea that dared to take flight would only crash back to the ground. The gravity of reality is too strong.”

“Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?”

“Then that’s equivalent to saying that the correct philosophy falls out of the sky. This is against the idea that the truth emerges from experience. It’s counter to the principles of how Marxism seeks to understand nature.”

If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil?

Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.…

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

How naïve I was! But who wasn’t once naïve? What’s done is done. When you make a mistake, what’s important is to recognize it and correct it. Then you can continue the revolution.”

“She was like a star, always so distant. Even the light she shone on me was always cold.”

“To accomplish something in theoretical physics requires one to have almost religious faith. It’s easy to be led to the abyss.”

Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?

He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body.

“But she was a woman. A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.”

“Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”

“I’m saying that there’s always someone behind things that don’t seem to have an explanation.”

By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”

Everyone likes to reminisce, but no one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old.…”

“This place isn’t really peaceful. There are lots of tourists, and many pilgrims too. The truly peaceful can find peace in a bustling city. And to attain that state, you need to empty yourself.”

“No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”

Saving a species of bird or insect is no different from saving humankind. ‘All lives are equal’ is the basic tenet of Pan-Species Communism.”