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.
The stars winked down their cryptic morse, and he had no key to their cipher.
Would that I were the heaven, that I might be
All full of love-lit eyes to gaze on thee.
But who can count the stars of Heaven?
Who sing their influence on this lower world?
She had a pretty face but her head was up in space, she needed to come back down to Earth!
The stars,
Which stand as thick as dewdrops on the fields
Of heaven.
In yonder pensile orb, and every sphere
That gems the starry girdle of the year.