How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.
—Gerard de Nerval (1808–55) French Poet, Essayist, Critic
When a load of bricks, dumped on a corner lot, can arrange themselves into a house; when a handful of springs and screws and wheels, emptied on a desk, can gather themselves into a watch, then and not until then will it seem sensible, to some of us at least, to believe that all these thousands or millions of worlds could have been created, balanced and set to revolving in their separate orbits—all without any directing intelligence at all.
—Bruce Fairchild Barton (1886–1967) American Author, Advertising Executive, Politician
The Universe knows itself and expands itself through me.
—Joan Borysenko
I don’t pretend to understand the Universe—it’s a great deal bigger than I am.
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces between stars—on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home to scare myself with my own desert places.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
Nothing is accidental in the universe—this is one of my Laws of Physics—except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
—Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright, Poet, Literary Critic
Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies—and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.
—James Thurber
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be—I hope it is—redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
—William Golding (1911–93) English Novelist
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreignness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
If that’s how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what’s left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning).
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire—in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
Perhaps there are somewhere in the infinite universe beings whose minds outrank our minds to the same extent as our minds surpass those of the insects. Perhaps there will once somewhere live beings who will look upon us with the same condescension as we look upon amoebae.
—Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) Austrian Economist, Philosopher, Author
The universe is wider than our views of it.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
The universe is one of God’s thoughts.
—Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German Poet, Dramatist
Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said, “Why should I lament the disappearance of my people! All things end, and the white man will find this out also.” And this goes for the universe. One can be at peace with that. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t participate in efforts to correct the situation. But underlying the effort to change must be an ‘at peace.’ To win a dog sled race is great. To lose is okay too.
—Joseph Campbell (1904–87) American Mythologist, Writer, Lecturer
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
—Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) English Theoretical Physicist, Cosmologist, Academic
In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.
—David Bohm (1917–92) American Theoretical Physicist
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb (1775–1834) British Essayist, Poet
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.
—Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009) French Social Anthropologist, Philosopher
Everything you’ve learned in school as obvious becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
—Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American Inventor, Philosopher
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe…Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
—Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) English Theoretical Physicist, Cosmologist, Academic
I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) English Occultist, Mystic, Magician
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.
—Eugene Ionesco (1909–94) Romanian-born French Dramatist
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
—Carl Sagan (1934–96) American Astronomer
The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.
—Louis Pasteur (1822–95) French Biologist
Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was, so silvery warm
—H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English Novelist, Historian, Social Thinker
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg (1933–2021) American Physicist
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.
—J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) British Biologist, Geneticist
The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, – every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.
—Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American New Thought Writer, Physician, Entrepreneur
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not everyone is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
—Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English Novelist, Scriptwriter
Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering
—Abraham Maslow (1908–70) American Psychologist, Academic, Humanist
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
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 (1934–96) American Astronomer
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase being born is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while dying means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (c.43 BCE–c.18 CE) Roman Poet