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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:

Rational comprehension of the universe is not enough. We must call to our aid not merely reason, but the vision and the spiritual insight of the ages. These things we must seek.

Vincent Massey Speaking Of Canada (1959)

The Universe is the greatest piece of art

Jacek Tylicki

Any intelligent race you can hope to someday relate to is going to have to come up essentially the same developmental roads and deal with the physical laws of the Universe in about the same way.

Algis Budrys Hard Landing (1993)

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Frank Zappa The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989)

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

Carl Sagan Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

Charles Stross Accelerando (2005)

How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Isaac Asimov The Last Question (1956)

Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

Fritz Leiber The Big Time (1958)

I can't help preferring champagne to ditch water — I doubt if the universe does.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

There was a god or goddess of wind, rain, lightning, thunder, clouds, stars, sun, and of course, the moon goddess, and they all more or less worked under SkyMaker.

Jane Roberts Emir's Education In The Proper Use of Magical Powers (1979)

The patterns of mathematics can be roughly grouped into five archetypes: Number, Space, Logic, Infinity, and Information.

Rudy Rucker Mind Tools (1987)

That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.

Alastair Reynolds Pushing Ice (2005)

“I worry that it’s me they’re really after.”
“You don’t exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.”

Alastair Reynolds Blue Remembered Earth (2012)

The Marquesans and the Gilbert Islanders divided the year into intervals which had no connection with the lunar month and were governed solely by the stars.

Maud Worcester Makemson The Morning Star Rises (1941)

He felt…good, which should’ve been a sign. If life taught Zig anything, it’s that the universe saves its best punches for when you least expect it.

Brad Meltzer The Escape Artist (2018)

Since before time and space were,
the Tao is.
It is beyond is and is not.
How do I know this is true?
I look inside myself and see.

Laozi interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

My theology, briefly,
Is that the Universe
Was Dictated
But not Signed.

Christopher Morley

The night of the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. The first star that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was the herald of the dawn.

Robert G. Ingersoll The Great Infidels (1881)

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Václav Havel

He was accustomed to questioning an essentially impassive universe. The physical world might be maddeningly close-lipped about its secrets, but it didn’t lie, and it never actively tried to deceive you.

Michael Swanwick Bones of the Earth (2002)

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