Quotes about space
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“When you bow deeply to the universe, it bows back; when you call out the name of God, it echoes inside you.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

Source: The Art of Peace (1992)

God

“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Life, Stupidity

“The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Variant: The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.”

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian pedagogue, philosopher and physician

Love, Understanding, Teachers

“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Understanding

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

Star, Sense

“Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

“In the particular is contained the universal.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

“But in his experience it was only a matter of time before the normal balance of the universe restored itself and started doing the usual terrible things to him.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Color of Magic

Time

“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.”

Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) austrian economist

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 26

Women, Men, Books, Animals

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Music, Way

“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

“We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Lie, Sleep, Parting

“Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time

Knowledge

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

Carl Sagan book The Demon-Haunted World

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 1 : The Most Precious Thing, p. 12
Source: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

“Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

For Wife, love, Good Night, Cute

“I see evil when I look in my shaving mirror. It is, philosophically, present everywhere in the universe in order, apparently, to highlight the existence of good. I think there is more to this theory, but I tend to burst out laughing at this point.”

Terry Pratchett book Unseen Academicals

Source: Unseen Academicals

Thinking, Evil

“In an infinite Universe anything can happen.”

Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact

Love, Life, Study

“And then there is the universal role of adult. When you play that role, you take yourself and life very seriously. Spontaneity, lightheartedness, and joy are not part of that role.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Life, Joy, Parting

“Man is a universe within himself.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

“Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm.”

Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything

Source: Life, the Universe and Everything

World, Law, Mathematics, Parting

“Believe something and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you've changed, by believing. Once you've changed, other things start to follow. Isn't that the way it works?”

Diane Duane book So You Want to Be a Wizard

Source: So You Want to Be a Wizard

Way, Change

“Midlife: when the Universe grabs your shoulders and tells you “I’m not f-ing around, use the gifts you were given.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

“Each person's life – each lifeform,
in fact – represents a world, a
unique way in which the universe experiences itself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Life, World, Way, Personality

“Nonresistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe.”

Eckhart Tolle book A New Earth

A New Earth (2005)

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Relationship, Lovers

“Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

“The universe doesn't allow perfection.”

Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time

Perfection

“The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life, World, Beauty, Understanding

“Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real--the here-and-now. Seize the day.”

Saul Bellow book Seize the Day

Source: Seize the Day

People, Past, Future

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1993), ISBN 0-09-922391-0.

“I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

Source: Viper's Tangle

Life, Men, Hate

“The universe is always speaking to us…. Sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.”

Nancy Thayer (1943) American novelist

“Men destroy countries; Women destroy universes.”

Fredrick

Women, Men, Country

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

July 1890, page 313
John of the Mountains, 1938

Way

“The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Life, People

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Waiting

“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant translation: In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

Way, Star, Time

“I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

World

“But we're a university! Weto have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?"

"Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely.”

Terry Pratchett book The Last Continent

Source: The Last Continent

People

“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”

Harlan Ellison book Paladin of the Lost Hour

Paladin of the Lost Hour (1985)

Way, Memory, Time, Cry

“The President of the Universe holds no real power. His sole purpose is to take attention away from where the power truly exists…”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless eternal universe.-The Watcher in The Avengers #14”

Stan Lee (1922–2018) American comic book writer

Source: Essential Avengers, Vol. 1

“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Truth, Error

“The universe was good because he was in it.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

(1993), Epilogue, p. 155
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)

Life, Understanding, Effort

“It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

Death

“I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Ich soll niemals anders verfahren als so, dass ich auch wollen könne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden.
Kant's supreme moral principle or "categorical imperative"; Variant translations:
Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature.
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.
Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
Do not feel forced to act, as you're only willing to act according to your own universal laws. And that's good. For only willfull acts are universal. And that's your maxim.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Law, Way

“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we alow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things extraordinary.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Source: A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog

Life, Truth, Beauty, Way

“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.”

René Girard (1923–2015) French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science

Source: The One by Whom Scandal Comes

World

“The thing is, I mean, there’s times when you look at the universe and you think, “What about me?” and you can just hear the universe replying, “Well, what about you?”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

Thinking, Time

“Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…”

Terry Pratchett book The Light Fantastic

Source: The Light Fantastic

Women, Problem

“There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Men, Sadness

“In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

World, Singing

“So much universe, and so little time.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Time

“The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.”

Terry Pratchett book Equal Rites

Source: Equal Rites

“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Life, Question

“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 74

Night

“All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Thinking

“The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

People, Nature

“But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment."
I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod,"nothing but a gnab gib."
A what?"
Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy.”

Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.”

Terry Pratchett book Hogfather

Source: Hogfather

People, World, Intelligence

“the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: On the Heights of Despair

Life

“He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, which stands continually open before our eyes (I say the 'Universe'), but can not be understood without first learning to comprehend the language and know the characters as it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to humanly understand a word; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth.”

Galileo Galilei book The Assayer

From Italian: La filosofia è scritta in questo grandissimo libro, che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi agli occhi (io dico l'Universo), ma non si può intendere, se prima non il sapere a intender la lingua, e conoscer i caratteri ne quali è scritto. Egli è scritto in lingua matematica, e i caratteri son triangoli, cerchi ed altre figure geometriche, senza i quali mezzi è impossibile intenderne umanamente parola; senza questi è un aggirarsi vanamente per un oscuro labirinto.
Other translations:
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
The Assayer (1623), as translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661), p. 178, as quoted in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (2003) by Edwin Arthur Burtt, p. 75.
Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
As translated in The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966) by Richard Henry Popkin, p. 65
Il Saggiatore (1623)
Source: Galilei, Galileo. Il Saggiatore: Nel Quale Con Bilancia Efquifita E Giufta Si Ponderano Le Cofe Contenute Nellalibra Astronomica E Filosofica Di Lotario Sarsi Sigensano, Scritto in Forma Di Lettera All'Illustr. Et Rever. Mons. D. Virginio Cesarini. In Roma: G. Mascardi, 1623. Google Play. Google. Web. 22 Dec. 2015. <https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-U0ZAAAAYAAJ>.

Books, Mathematics, Understanding, Learning

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Variant: The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Beauty, Peaceful, Life, Nature