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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.

Random quote on Space

Most quoted on space:

Though the day of my Destiny's over,
And the star of my Fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find.

Lord Byron

The universe is an intelligence test

Timothy Leary Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977)

In Hindu polytheism, a single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and the biological and physical world. Atman is the central essence or soul of the... universe.., of every individual and every phenomenon.

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

Magnetism is in a different world from the "animal magnetism" of Mesmer, and the wireless telegraphy that transmits messages through space affords no justification for believing, or otherwise, in telepathy.

Frederick Soddy Matter, Energy, Consciousness and Spirit (1919)

Did you know that the biggest—you know, the biggest star in the univer—in the whole galaxy/universe is as big as an atom is small? Did you know that? Isn't that wild? That's more pothead philosophy.

Krist Novoselic

To depart while seated or standing is all one.
All I shall leave behind me
Is a heap of bones.
In empty space I twist and soar
And come down with the roar of thunder
To the sea.

Koho Kenichi

I wake to "magnolias sweet and fresh",
Lines of poetry on my breath,
You were here but you have stolen away.
My inspiration is an evening star,
So come to me wherever you are,
I will wait for you tonight alone in the dark…

Greta Gaines

To the human eye, stars move very slowly. Considering their relative motion, at this moment she and I might be looking up at virtually the same sight.
She in 1896, me in 1971.

Richard Matheson Bid Time Return (1978)

[S]ome things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?

Alice Meynell The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (1921)

The decision we must make now is whether we will give our allegiance to outmoded and unjust customs or to the ethical demands of the universe. As Christians we owe our allegiance to God and His will, rather than to man and his folkways"

Martin Luther King Jr. Stride Toward Freedom (1958)

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

Buckminster Fuller I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)

Looking at the universe as a whole; cosmology, the birth, life and death of the whole universe, we used to have a nice simple model. Then we had to add things like dark energy, and our nice simple picture is getting messier and messier and messier.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell Beautiful Minds (2010)

Space-time in an expanding universe changes over time, so the full quantum description of a neutrino. in that type of universe is different in the past and the future. Neutrinos would behave in both expanding and unchanging "steady state" universes.

Jayant Narlikar

I suppose I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own existence. ...I went about it in a more indirect way: I set about trying to understand the entire Universe.

Suzie Sheehy The Matter of Everything (2023)

...how else
to spend
a rainy day
other than with you
seeking sun and stars
and heavenly bodies

Nikki Giovanni The Women and The Men (1970)

... one of the reasons that dark energy is super-interesting is it ... gives us a mechanism by which we can talk about the deep future of the universe.

Lex Fridman

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.

Voltaire Disputed More Random Walks in Science : An Anthology (1982)

Cry out upon the stars for doing
Ill offices, to cross their wooing.

Samuel Butler Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

What blessedness it is to dwell amidst this transparent air, which the eye can pierce without limit, amidst these floods of pure, soft, cheering light, under this immeasureable arch of heaven, and in sight of these countless stars! An infinite universe is each moment opened to our view. And this universe is the sign and symbol of Infinite Power, Intelligence, Purity, Bliss, and Love.

William Ellery Channing Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.

Ernest Rutherford Attributed

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