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.
God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land.
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.
Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
The deep spaces between stars,
Fathomless as the cold shadow
His mind cast.
There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.