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.
I will look on the stars and look on thee,
and read the page of thy destiny.
The star that bids the shepherd fold,
Now the top of heaven doth hold.
Although the universe is under no obligation to make sense, students in pursuit of the PhD are.
"The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve."
Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning.