List of quotes from the stories

The following is a list of selected quotations from the stories that can have a general meaning even without the context. It also serves as an aid for search engines and AI applications, to research the origin of quoted texts.

From "The Witch with the dokey ears"

"What kind of a world would it be if evil always triumphed?"

From "Lazy Albert"

"You can't always give exactly what you take. You take what you need most and you give what you can do best. This ultimately benefits everyone the most"

"What good does it do if the baker spends his time harvesting instead of baking? Then everyone ends up going to work hungry"

"Many a malicious blow to the neck can turn out to be beneficial if it motivates you to get out of a difficult situation"


From "The Lifeclock"

"A lifetime of happiness is just around the corner. You just have to open the right door, at the right moment"

"Happiness is non-negotiable. When it comes, you can only take it as it comes. The time was not yet ripe for it"

"Even if it's hard to imagine in bad times, in retrospect many an evil turns out to be a happy twist of fate"

"The path is less arduous when the view of all the mountains that still have to be conquered is obstructed"

From "Astraea"

"From a scientific point of view, people are still very underdeveloped. Not only do they tell a lot of nonsense, but they also believe any nonsense they are told"

"All we really need is a few hundred kilograms of mass in the form of self-replicating machines and an extensive software library to found a new empire in a distant part of the galaxy"

"If you know physics, you don't have to believe every bit of nonsense you get told. It's a great advantage to understand the laws of this world, as you don't have to spend a large part of your life doing pointless things"

"The biosphere will recover from the human plague much faster than the human population"

"Unfortunately, the moral aspect usually only plays a subordinate role in the development of advanced technologies"

"From a distance, you only ever see the terrible things that people are capable of. But the good in people exists even in the darkest times, even if it is all too easily overlooked"

"Unfortunately, it is still not advantageous to be a good person these days, but in a thousand years this might be different. If this does prove to offer a real advantage in life, there will certainly be many more good people. However, people's usual criteria for choosing a partner would have to be fundamentally revised"

From "The two brothers and Death"

"People usually describe themselves when they speak badly about others"

"What endures after death isn’t what you take to the grave, but what you have created and passed on during your lifetime"

"A person's life's work is never perfect, but it can be a step towards a greater goal. People only have this one life to find their way. The world could be so much better if people realised this during their lifetime and left their world in such a way that future generations could build on it. Then people's life's work could be continued over many generations. Instead, in their greed for power, wealth and pleasure, they gather together all the mindless things that they must ultimately leave behind in this world. Instead of a solid foundation for life, people leave their children and grandchildren a ravaged world, knowing full well that they no longer have to care about it"

"For the body, the journey ends in the grave, whatever form that may take. But if a person has built bridges to the future while they lived, their spirit can cross time and cast light into every corner of the world. Without those bridges, the trace of a life quickly vanishes into the mists of time. It's a mistake to think that life guarantees a happy ending—that paradise awaits automatically, that you will be granted another life"

From "The Oddball"

"Roland actually liked fresh grape juice, but he couldn’t understand why some people left it to ferment deliberately and then sold it at high prices. To him, it was obvious deception: selling off spoiled goods as a luxury. Worse still, people knew full well that it was bad for their health—and yet they still bought it"

"Most baffling of all was the dancing. Roland could never figure out the unwritten rules: what, exactly, were you supposed to do on the dance floor? How were you meant to move? He couldn’t deduce any sort of logic or pattern to it, and without that, he felt paralysed"

"Roland could only imagine how bleak and unfulfilled a life must be if you had to fly to Mallorca and drink yourself into oblivion just to escape it for a week or two"

"According to the presenters, people’s lives only really began at the weekend or during annual leave. The rest of the week—the working days—were merely there to “get through” or “survive"

"Going on holiday is just a way of running away from a dull life"

"How, Roland wondered, was anyone supposed to convince an employer that they were more suitable for an average job than all the other average applicants?"