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.
For nothing this wide Universe I call,
Save thou, my Rose; in it thou art my all.
When you reach for a star
Only angels are there
And it's not very far
Just a step on a stair…
This hairy meteor did announce
The fall of sceptres and of crowns.
Where Andes, giant of the western star,
With meteor standard to the winds unfurl'd.
While twilight's curtain gathering far,
Is pinned with a single diamond star.
Or soar aloft to be the spangled skies
And gaze upon her with a thousand eyes.
The starres of the night
Will lend thee their light,
Like tapers cleare without number.
The dawn is lonely for the sun,
And chill and drear;
The one lone star is pale and wan,
As one in fear.
Now the bright morning-star, day's harbinger,
Comes dancing from the east.
Hesperus bringing together
All that the morning star scattered.
As shaking terrors from his blazing hair,
A sanguine comet gleams through dusky air.