Universe Carl Sagan Quotes

#1. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.

Carl Sagan

#2. We are, each of us, a multitude. Within us is a little universe.

Carl Sagan

#3. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?

Carl Sagan

#4. The universe forces those who live in it to understand it.

Carl Sagan

#5. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#7. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe Few found the similarity suspicious.

Carl Sagan

#8. 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

#9. Your god is too small for my universe.

Carl Sagan

#10. Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?

Carl Sagan

#11. Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in a different part of the universe and in another epoch in time . . . Black holes may be entrances to Wonderlands. But are there Alices or white rabbits?

Carl Sagan

#12. We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy.

Carl Sagan

#13. We are a way of the universe knowing itself.

Carl Sagan

#14. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

Carl Sagan

#15. The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

Carl Sagan

#16. 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

#17. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.

Carl Sagan

#18. When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

Daniel Hope

#19. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Carl Sagan

#20. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.

Carl Sagan

#21. Cosmos is closed and light cannot escape from it, then it may be perfectly correct to describe the universe as a black hole. If you wish to know what it is like inside a black hole, look around you.

Carl Sagan

#22. Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

Carl Sagan

#23. There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design.

Carl Sagan

#24. For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan

#25. The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.

Carl Sagan

#26. A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

Carl Sagan

#27. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

#28. We live in an in-between universe where things change all right ... but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature.

Carl Sagan

#29. There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises

Carl Sagan

#30. The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

Carl Sagan

#31. If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?

Carl Sagan

#32. The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

Carl Sagan

#33. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit.

Carl Sagan

#34. The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]

Carl Sagan

#35. Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs
in time, in space, and in potential
the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

Carl Sagan

#36. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

Carl Sagan

#37. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Carl Sagan

#38. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Carl Sagan

#39. If you want to make a [rhubarb] pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe.

Carl Sagan

#40. Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

Carl Sagan

#41. Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.

Carl Sagan

#42. You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as ... cultivated.

Carl Sagan

#43. Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving

Carl Sagan

#44. 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

#45. Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we're made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.

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

#47. All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions.

Carl Sagan

#48. Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Carl Sagan

#49. So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.

Carl Sagan

#50. By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

Carl Sagan

#51. The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Carl Sagan

#52. Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.

Carl Sagan

#53. The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.

Carl Sagan

#54. 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

#55. The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Carl Sagan

#56. 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