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Quotes from The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God — Carl Sagan

1934–1996 United States

← All quotes by Carl Sagan

23 quotes

And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

It is, I think, very interesting that we have a world in the outer solar system that is loaded with the stuff of life.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

I stress that the universe is made mostly of nothing, that something is the exception.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Science is, at least in part, informed worship.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

If we seek... nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance...

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

A general problem with much of Western theology... is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less a universe.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe... has not been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially in no Western religions.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Carl Sagan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.