The Universe in Verse Quotes

“...we are matter capable of wonder. . .”
― Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

“In what may be the single most poignant one-word alteration in the history of our species, he changed the final line of the penultimate stanza to reflect his war-annealed recognition that entropy dominates all. The original version reads: "We must love one another or die" — an impassioned plea for compassion as a moral imperative, the withholding of which assures the destruction of life. But the plea had gone unanswered and eighty million lives had gone unsaved. Auden came to feel that his reach for poetic truth had been rendered "a damned lie," later lamenting that however our ideals and idealisms may play out, "we must die anyway."

A decade of disquiet after the end of the war, he changed the line to read: "We must love one another and die.”
― Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

“Once there were flowers, there was fruit—that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar.”
― Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry

“Meanwhile, its assuring constancy goes hedging against our own transience, slaking our yearning for permanence in a cosmos governed by incessant change.”
― Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry