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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.

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Most quoted on space:

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

Willard van Orman Quine

Can we find "The Universe in a grain of sand"? Well perhaps, but a stone seems easier to visualize.

Peter J. Carroll The Apophenion (2008)

Universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. There exists a mental affinity; a scientific law; a rhythm of mental relationship in which the entire living world is held together, in one web of love.

Chinmayananda Saraswati

Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.

Geoffrey West

In Clavain’s experience, it was the less comforting possibility that generally turned out to be the case. It was the way the universe worked.

Alastair Reynolds Redemption Ark (2002)

Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung.

Stephen Baxter Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.

Mircea Eliade The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom (2011)

Space, time, mass, and energy originate from Chaos, have their being in Chaos, and through th agency of the aether are moved by Chaos into the multiple forms of existence.

Peter J. Carroll Liber Null & Psychonaut (1987)

He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

Alastair Reynolds Redemption Ark (2002)

If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this...these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.

Dan Simmons The Rise of Endymion (1997)

Maybe perhaps we live on a ball that rotates around the sun, that flies through the universe, and maybe our climate just changes.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

Jack Kerouac

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

Kenneth Tynan Tynan Right and Left (1967)

The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.

Camille Paglia Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Every particle of the dust has universal unity. The individual is only in the same way a part of the Infinite Being who fills in the universe, a particle whish has been momentarily detached there from only to return thither.

Shah Badakhshi The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

Outer space is like Dolly Parton. You don't quite believe it, but there it is.

Lorne Greene

We will sing to you, Doctor. The universe will sing you to your sleep. This song is ending. But the story never ends.

Russell T Davies

One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect.

Rudy Rucker The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2016)

The harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.

John Greenleaf Whittier

She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.

Charles Stross Accelerando (2005)

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