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.
No one sees what is before his feet: we all gaze at the stars.
Whilst twilight's curtain spreading far,
Was pinned with a single star.
I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars.
We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.—
There is no easy way to the stars from the earth.
The stars shall be rent into threds of light,
And scatter'd like the beards of comets.