Space Quotes
Science fiction and poetry share this page: Alastair Reynolds leads, then Milton, Shakespeare, Carl Sagan and Dejan Stojanovic. The best-sourced entries are small. Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) has everyone in the gutter and some looking at the stars. Emerson’s Nature (1836) wonders how men would adore if the stars appeared one night in a thousand years. Stephen Crane’s poem from 1899 has a man announcing to the universe that he exists, and the universe replying that this has not created in it a sense of obligation.
“If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space” is credited to Sagan and flagged misattributed, though the notes record a 1972 Boston University symposium where he said something close to it. Voltaire’s clockmaker line and a Marcus Aurelius line about harmony with the universe are disputed.
Her blue eyes sought the west afar,
For lovers love the western star.
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered.
No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere.
Every movement in the skies or upon the earth proclaims to us that the universe is under government.
Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?