Carl Sagan
340 quotes
Biography
"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
"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."
"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality."
"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"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?"
"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."
"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."
"I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
"I don't want to believe. I want to know."
"The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."
"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."
"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."
"She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
"It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?"
"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."
"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."
"Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."
"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."