Quotes about space
page 12
"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
“Don't we all live in our heads? Where else could we possibly exist? Our brainsthe universe.”
Source: Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
Source: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
“The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.”
He Who Shapes (1965)
Source: The Dream Master
“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”
9 December 1852
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet
Source: The Art of Seduction
“Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 248
First line of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.
Source: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869
“This might hurt a little is universal code for this will definitely hurt a lot”
Source: The Last Guardian
“The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.”
Source: The Dharma Bums
“Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.”
Source: The Law of Divine Compensation: Mastering the Metaphysics of Abundance
Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16<!-- p. 228-->
Source: Brave New World (1932)
Context: I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
“Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.”
“to have solely one thought, but it to be capable to destroy the universe.”
Source: The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
Source: Sandman Slim
Source: Seduce Me at Sunrise
The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.
Epitaph, upon his instructions to erect a "a plain die or cube … surmounted by an Obelisk" with "the following inscription, and not a word more…because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered." It omits that he had been President of the United States, a position of political power and prestige, and celebrates his involvement in the creation of the means of inspiration and instruction by which many human lives have been liberated from oppression and ignorance.
Posthumous publications
“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.”
The Controller, Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 17
Source: Brave New World (1932)
“We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”
Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)
Source: Cordelia's Honor
Context: Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 53
Context: Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.
“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”
Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Source: Skinny Legs and All
“Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.”
Source: Ready Player One
“You are the ever-expanding universe to me”
Source: Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
“I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”
"Grizzly Man" (2006)
describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22-24
The Doors of Perception (1954)
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Context: Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
“He stared at his hot chocolate like it held the secret to the universe.”
Source: Strange Angels
Source: Divisadero
“In doing Good, I lose myself in Being, I abandon my particularity, I become a universal subject.”
77
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 230-231.
An Interview with Dracula and his Brides (2004)
In a live interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News, on the day of the first moonwalk (20 July 1969)
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, Volume I (1907–1949): Learning Curve (2010)
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)
Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 40.
1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 259.
Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
ALP in 'me-too' policy mess over death penalty, 10 October 2007, 13 February 2008, The Age http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/rudds-metoo-policy-mess/2007/10/09/1191695909938.html,
Statement made in 2002.
2002
Speech to University students (1959)
“The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 12, section 4 (p. 179)
