Carl Sagan Life Quotes

#1. We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.

Carl Sagan

#2. If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

Carl Sagan

#3. Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn't any good evidence.

Carl Sagan

#4. Even victims of atrocious brutality and intractable pain may retain a longing, sometimes even a zest, for life.

Carl Sagan

#5. But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect?

Carl Sagan

#6. The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

Carl Sagan

#7. Of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System, there is fire only on Earth - because there are large amounts of oxygen gas, O2, only on Earth. Fire was, much later, to have profound consequences for life and intelligence. One thing leads to another.

Carl Sagan

#8. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

Carl Sagan

#9. Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.

Carl Sagan

#10. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it.

Carl Sagan

#11. Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Carl Sagan

#12. Observation: there was absolutely nothing to see on Venus. Conclusion: it must be covered with life.

Carl Sagan

#13. We can't help it. Life looks for life.

Carl Sagan

#14. Some racists still reject the plain testimony written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but nearly indistinguishable ...

Carl Sagan

#15. The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Carl Sagan

#16. All her life, dreams had been her friends. Her dreams were unusually detailed, well-structured, colorful.

Carl Sagan

#17. The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us
there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

Carl Sagan

#18. There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a 100 billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe.

Carl Sagan

#19. Modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival.

Carl Sagan

#20. A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.

Carl Sagan

#21. It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.

Carl Sagan

#22. Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth ... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

Carl Sagan

#23. We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.

Carl Sagan

#24. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate ... Choose science.

Carl Sagan

#25. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Carl Sagan

#26. It was difficult to hold Broca's brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still in there - his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments.

Carl Sagan

#27. I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.

Carl Sagan

#28. To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

Carl Sagan

#29. If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life.
Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes.

Carl Sagan

#30. The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.

Carl Sagan

#31. We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world.

Carl Sagan

#32. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees.

Carl Sagan

#33. We make our purpose.

Carl Sagan

#34. On the scale of worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. It

Carl Sagan

#35. We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.

Carl Sagan

#36. The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question - the search for who we are.

Carl Sagan

#37. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

Carl Sagan

#38. Thus, 99 percent of the Earth's atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

Carl Sagan

#39. Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

Ann Druyan

#40. We are ... capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars.

Carl Sagan

#41. It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age.

Carl Sagan

#42. The tar is an extremely rich collection of complex organic molecules, including the constituent parts of proteins and nucleic acids. The stuff of life, it turns out, can be very easily made.

Carl Sagan

#43. I agree, along with Carl Sagan, that we should eventually become a two planet species. Life is too precious to place on a single planet.

Michio Kaku

#44. When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

Carl Sagan

#45. Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them ... It doesn't seem strange to me.

Carl Sagan

#46. Apart from a thin film of life at the very surface of the Earth, an occasional intrepid spacecraft, and some radio static, our impact on the Universe is nil. It knows nothing of us.

Carl Sagan