Cosmos Quotes

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“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, Cosmos

“One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. ”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend
to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“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, Cosmos