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by Carl Sagan

She had caught a glimpse of something majestic. Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed unless you looked deeply into mathematics.

New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology.

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

He knew, he was confident, what dummies knew.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this right,” she would say to herself. “I’ve taken an inert gas that’s in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities into a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.”

vast areas of the Southwest in which the only sign of intelligent life was an occasional straight line heading between mountains and across deserts.

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

Two-hundred-quadrillion-Mississippi...” he once imagined the patient timekeeper intoning, counting up the seconds from the origin of the world.)

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. —ALBERT EINSTEIN Ideas and Opinions

“What a wonderful program in this little guy’s head!” he exclaimed.

Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real.

Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive.

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

“Do Buddhists believe in God, or not?” Ellie asked on their way to have dinner with the Abbot. “Their position seems to be,” Vaygay replied dryly, “that their God is so great he doesn’t even have to exist.”

But if you must search the streets for food, you will not have enough time for physics.

In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

Hence “black,” hence “hole.”

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