Persons [ ] The cosmos is within us | Carl Sagan, 1934-1996
Carl Sagan with Viking lander model, 1980
“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
“You have to know the past to understand the present.”
“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
“If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go”
“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”
“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.”
“You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.”
“Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.”
“Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos.”
“Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.”
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
The Humanoids Where Here the plaque affixed the the Pioneer 10 & 11 spacecraft. NASA
“Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.”
“Every star may be a sun to someone.”
“All colours are arbitrary.”
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
“There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.”
“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”
“Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.”
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
“I don’t want to believe. I want to know.”
“It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.”
“An organism at war with itself is doomed.”
“We can’t help it. Life looks for life.”
“Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.”
“Nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.”
“In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
“To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.”
“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”
“Gullibility kills.”
Carl Sagan, 1934-1996
astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist
Jeff Albertson, Carl Sagan, with a copy of the plaque that flew with the Pioneer space probes, in Boston, March 1972
