Quotes From "Cosmos" By Carl Sagan

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious....
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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
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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
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms...
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The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Carl Sagan
The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to...
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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
It is said that men may not be the dreams...
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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
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Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. 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
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What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." (1980)]. Carl Sagan
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Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. 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. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. . Carl Sagan
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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
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If you had walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890's, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world. . Carl Sagan
In the vastness of space and the immensity of time,...
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In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos] Carl Sagan
By looking far out into space we are also looking...
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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
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Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. Carl Sagan
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,...
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If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
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We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. Carl Sagan
There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your...
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There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe. Neil Degrasse Tyson
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into...
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We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. Carl Sagan
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National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. Carl Sagan
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The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality. Carl Sagan
If we long for our planet to be important, there...
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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
There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s...
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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
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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
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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
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The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small. Carl Sagan
When we look up at night and view the stars,...
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When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion. Carl Sagan
And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We...
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And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude. Carl Sagan
We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not...
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We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. Carl Sagan
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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. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages. Carl Sagan
For ages men had used sticks to club and spear...
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For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other– Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time. Carl Sagan
Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and...
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Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war? Carl Sagan
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What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of gods. You might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis; that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature, through which the world could be understood without attributing the fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus. Carl Sagan
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What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working m. Carl Sagan
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries...
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Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil. Carl Sagan
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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
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For thousands of years humans were oppressed– as some of us still are– by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2, 500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea. Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away. . Carl Sagan
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A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone. Carl Sagan
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Something very strange is going on in the depths of space. Carl Sagan
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We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. 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
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The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species. Carl Sagan
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We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. . Carl Sagan
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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. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages. We now know that our universe or at least its most recent incarnation - is some fifteen or twenty billion years old. This is the time since a remarkable explosive event called the Big Bang. At the beginning of this universe, there were no galaxies, stars or planets, no life or civilizations, merely a uniform, radiant fireball filling all of space. The passage from the Chaos of the Big Bang to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transformation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse. And until we find more intelligent beings elsewhere, we are ourselves the most spectacular of all the transformations - the remote descendants of the Big Bang, dedicated to understanding and further transforming the Cosmos from which we spring. Carl Sagan
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The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps [of an oscillating universe]. If the universe has already gone through many oscillations, many possible laws of gravity would have been so weak that, for any given initial expansion, the universe would not have held together. Once the universe stumbles upon such a gravitational law, it flies apart and has no further opportunity to experience another oscillation and another cusp and another set of laws of nature. Thus we can deduce from the fact that the universe exists either a finite age, or a severe restriction on the kinds of laws of nature permitted in each oscillation. If the laws of physics are not randomly reshuffled at the cusps, there must be a regularity, a set of rules, that determines which laws are permissible and which are not. Such a set of rules would comprise a new physics standing over the existing physics. Our language is impoverished; there seems to be no suitable name for such a new physics. Both 'paraphysics' and 'metaphysics' have been preempted by other rather different and, quite possibly, wholly irrelevant activities. Perhaps 'transphysics' would do. Carl Sagan
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For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Carl Sagan
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Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us. Carl Sagan
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The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us. Carl Sagan
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Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex. Carl Sagan
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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
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We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein. Carl Sagan
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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