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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:

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

John Muir Travels in Alaska (1915)

They send their shout to the stars.

Statius

O that my spirit were yon heaven of night,
Which gazes on thee with its thousand eyes.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert.

Gilbert Parker

Space is as infinite as we can imagine, and expanding this perspective is what adjusts humankind’s focus onto conquering our true enemies, the formidable foes: ignorance and limitation.

Vanna Bonta The Impact of Space Activities Upon Society (ESA Br) European Space Agency (2005)

And made the stars,
And set them in the firmament of heav'n,
T' illuminate the earth, and rule the day
In their vicissitude, and rule the night.

John Milton

Who rounded in his palm these spacious orbs
* * * * * *
Numerous as gliterring gems of morning dew,
Or sparks from populous cities in a blaze,
And set the bosom of old night on fire.

Edward Young

There is no light in earth or heaven
But the cold light of stars;
And the first watch of night is given
To the red planet Mars.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The stars stand sentinel by night.

John Norris

We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.

Arthur C. Clarke Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

That the heaven as a whole neither came into being nor admits of destruction, as some assert, but is one and eternal, with no end or beginning of its total duration, containing and embracing in itself the infinity of time.

Aristotle

So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

John Milton Lycidas (1637)

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.

Nathaniel Branden Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice (1963)

For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream in the same simple way as I dream about the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Vincent van Gogh

Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space. (p. 30) The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. p. 36

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

But soon, the prospect clearing,
By cloudless starlight on he treads
And thinks no lamp so cheering
As that light which Heaven sheds.

Thomas Moore

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Gene Roddenberry

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity (1952)

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

Rachel Carson

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