Quotes about Cosmos

Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.

Nietzsche mourns the loss of "man's belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplace-ability in the scheme of existence." For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep; he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, I will make a thing.

We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And

all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.

The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.

Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.

We are, you and I, at least one of the ways that the Universe knows itself

From this distant vantage point, the meat planet might not seem of any particular interest: an obscure and solitary lump, suspended in a sunbeam.

The total number of such worlds are, as I said, something of the order of a trillion, or 10^12, a one followed by twelve zeros, of which Earth represents just one, all in the family of the Sun. And our star, of course, is one of a vast multitude.