Cosmos Quotes - Page 15

• I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Writing, Thinking, Literature

  "Conversation with Kenzaburo Oe" by Harry Kreisler, "Conversations with History", Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, globetrotter.berkeley.edu. April 16, 1999.

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• There are three forces--of the body, mind and feeling. Unless these are together, equally developed and harmonized, a steady connection cannot be made with a higher force. Everything in the Work is a preparation for that connection. That is the aim of the work. The higher energy wishes to but cannot come down to the level of the body unless one works. Only by working can you fulfill your purpose and participate in the life of the cosmos. This is what can give meaning and significance to your life.

  Jeanne de Salzmann

  Giving, Feelings, Preparation

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• How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Would Be, Hammers, Higher

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits.

  Carl Sagan

  Perspective, Vision, Earth

  "Cosmos". p. 318. Book by Carl Sagan, 1980.

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• If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

  Stanley Kubrick

  Writing, Men, Symphony

  Interview with Eric Nordern, Playboy, September 1968.

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• I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night was being born-but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it!

  Richard E. Byrd

  Peace, Night, Clouds

  Richard E. Byrd (2003). “Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure”, p.85, Island Press

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• Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Thinking, Goal

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• And we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything.

  Umberto Eco

  Believe, Names, Giving

  Umberto Eco (2006). “The Island of the Day Before”, p.487, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Although gravity is by far the weakest force of nature, its insidious and cumulative action serves to determine the ultimate fate not only of individual astronomical objects but of the entire cosmos. The same remorseless attraction that crushes a star operates on a much grander scale on the universe as a whole.

  Paul Davies

  Crush, Nature, Stars

  Paul Davies (2008). “The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures About The Ultimate Fate Of The Universe”, p.65, Basic Books

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• This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe. We'll have the technology either to self-destruct, or [to] seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another hundred years. But if we end up going the life route instead of the death route, then in a distant future our cosmos will be teaming with life, all of which can be traced back to what we do-here and now. I don't know how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.

  Max Tegmark

  Moon, Technology, Self

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• Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. Will this happen before our technological civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos.

  Martin Rees

  Moon, Civilization, Space

  "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning". Book by Martin Rees, 2003.

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• I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.

  Frantz Fanon

  Heart, Intelligent, Men

  Frantz Fanon (1967). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.45, Pluto Press

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• We are special in the sense that we can know our place in the cosmos. We can know our place in space. We are at least one of the cosmos's ways of knowing itself. That fills me with reverence and joy. Another insight I really want people to consider is this: everyone has gotten this far. Everyone you meet has made it this far. Nobody is superior to anyone else from an evolutionary standpoint.

  Bill Nye

  Knowing, Space, People

  Source: thehumanist.com

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• The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Garbage, Would Be, Stories

  Source: www.wanliss.com

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• Political movements for justice are part of the fuller development of the cosmos, and nature is the matrix in which humans come to their self-awareness of their power to transform. Liberation movements are a fuller development of the cosmos's sense of harmony, balance, justice, and celebration. This is why true spiritual liberation demands rituals of cosmic celebrating and healing, which will in turn culminate in personal transformation and liberation.

  Matthew Fox

  Spiritual, Healing, Self

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• Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Years, Glue

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• The story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening, forever. It's what's known as the heat-death of the universe. An era when the cosmos will remain vast and cold and desolate for the rest of time the arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. It's an inescapable fact of the universe written into the fundamental laws of physics, the entire cosmos will die.

  Brian Cox

  Law, Arrows, Forever

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• The world has always been this way. I am sure in the mystery world of Egypt, ancient Atlantis, you pick a cosmos - There is always somebody on your case.

  Frederick Lenz

  Egypt, World, Way

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• Most of my nightmares that jolt me awake either involve the cosmos or something completely out of human control. In reality, I worry more about nuclear war, or war in general.

  Lorene Scafaria

  War, Reality, Worry

  "Filmmaker on 'Seeking a Friend's' origins". Interview with Mike Ayers, www.cnn.com. June 23, 2012.

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• One universe, four forces, billions of galaxies. The precision and complexity of our world is enough to make even the famous cosmologist go just a little bit crazy. How does it all fit together? Is there a single, overarching design to the cosmos? And if we find it, will we glimpse the mind of God?

  Morgan Freeman

  Crazy, Our World, Design

  "Morgan Freeman Takes You 'Through The Wormhole'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. June 1, 2010.

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• In this same tradition, beauty is inextricably bound up with the principles of order and harmony believed to underlie the cosmos. Artists in the Classical tradition, inspired by Platonic idealism, strove to create images that represented not the world of particulars-with all its defects-but an ideal image conceived in the mind, which was taken as representing some absolute, pure, ideal form of which all particular, material forms are but a mere shadow.

  John Walford

  Beauty, Taken, Artist

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• The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos...compared to that, we composers are nothing

  Karlheinz Stockhausen

  Art, September 11, Composer

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• We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.

  Ann Druyan

  Loneliness, Intelligent, May

  "Neil deGrasse Tyson and Executive Producer Ann Druyan Talk COSMOS: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY, Public Appetite for Science, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. March 17, 2014.

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• Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

  Martin Rees

  Stars, Effort, Focus

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• Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is: what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problems of the modern novel is: what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Hero, Book, Mean

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