“The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgement to have safely traveled from star to star.”
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 398
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996Related quotes
Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You
The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 1: Robert
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
Autobiography of Values (1978)
Context: I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.
Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" from a memoir, published (1817).
Context: It is evident that we cannot mean to affirm that the stars of the fifth, sixth, and seventh magnitudes are really smaller than those of the first, second, or third, and that we must ascribe the cause of the difference in the apparent magnitudes of the stars to a difference in their relative distances from us. On account of the great number of stars in each class, we must also allow that the stars of each succeeding magnitude, beginning with the first, are, one with another, further from us than those of the magnitude immediately preceding.
