Carl Sagan: Trending quotes (page 10)

“You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.”

“If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?”

“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”

“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.”

“Science is, at least in part, informed worship.”

“I've always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.”

“Those at too great a distance may, I am well aware, mistake ignorance for perspective.”

“We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.”

“We make our purpose.”

“If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”

“We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.”

“If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go”

“A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.”

“And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.”

“Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”

“Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”

“It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.”

“The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.”

“Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.”