The Universe Quotes

“I have realized; it is during the times I am far outside my element that I experience myself the most. That I see and feel who I really am, the most! I think that's what a comet is like, you see, a comet is born in the outer realms of the universe! But it's only when it ventures too close to our sun or to other stars that it releases the blazing "tail" behind it and shoots brazen through the heavens! And meteors become sucked into our atmosphere before they burst like firecrackers and realize that they're shooting stars! That's why I enjoy taking myself out of my own element, my own comfort zone, and hurling myself out into the unknown. Because it's during those scary moments, those unsure steps taken, that I am able to see that I'm like a comet hitting a new atmosphere: suddenly I illuminate magnificently and fire dusts begin to fall off of me! I discover a smile I didn't know I had, I uncover a feeling that I didn't know existed in me... I see myself. I'm a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I'm not going to die out. I guess I'm more like a comet then. I'm just going to keep on coming back.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I believe in strong women. I believe in the woman who is able to stand up for herself. I believe in the woman who doesn't need to hide behind her husband's back. I believe that if you have problems, as a woman you deal with them, you don't play victim, you don't make yourself look pitiful, you don't point fingers. You stand and you deal. You face the world with a head held high and you carry the universe in your heart.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other.”
― M. Scott Peck, A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered

“Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected.

Yes, Einstein was a badass.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

“The compass rose is nothing but a star with an infinite number of rays pointing in all directions.

It is the one true and perfect symbol of the universe.

And it is the one most accurate symbol of you.

Spread your arms in an embrace, throw your head back, and prepare to receive and send coordinates of being. For, at last you know—you are the navigator, the captain, and the ship.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.”
― Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)”
― Plato

“Worrying about outcomes over which I have no control is punishing myself before the universe has decided whether I ought to be punished.”
― Sherry Thomas, A Study in Scarlet Women

“This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.

The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.

The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries.”
― Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

“The Universe is made of hands;
Hands that twist fabric and sizzle in the air.

Hands that grasp curls and flick words away

Small, smooth fingers pouring gold over gaping wounds

Before slicing into soft tissue,

Blood mixing with gold.

Hands that make it beautiful.

The Universe is made of bones;

Bones that cut against yards of skin,

Warm and yielding and moulded around the wings that splay across his back.

Bones that cage the heart and dig into the hollows.

Bones that break,

Tear the warm, yielding skin.

Bones that shred and brush his chin.

The Universe is made of lips;

Lips that breathe and stutter warm sighs,

Caressing the cracks in his broken body, the body that he broke.

Lips that carve paths into stone,

That leave trails upon gooseflesh,

Lips that make incisions,

Too delicate to mend.

The Universe is made of blood;

Blood that runs warm and hot and steady and crimson,

Pumping beneath the stone and the gold.

Blood that burns with every jerk of limbs.

Blood that spills on open palms,

Staining the fabric,

Filling up his throat.

The Universe is made of eyes;

Eyes that breach and eyes that splice and eyes that never leave.

Eyes that ripple oceans.

Eyes that whisper in the dark.

Eyes that rip open the seams.

Eyes that create wounds, create chaos, create broken shards of blue.

Eyes that alight and

won’t

let

go.

The Universe was built.

The Universe fell.

You took it apart,

Dragged the chaos from my soul with your hands,

Your bones,

Your lips,

Your blood,

Your eyes.

And now you’re back.

And so is the Universe.

And so, I suppose, am I.

The Universe is made of five things.

The Universe is made of you.”
― Velvetoscar, Core 'ngrato

“It's amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time.”
― Alex Filippenko

“But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?”
― John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the
earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it
goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each
twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines,
and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe,
and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not
shine for some one mountain, or for some one island,
or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but
for other planets as well as our earth. If you would
only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground
beneath your own feet, you might all understand this,
and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines
for you, or for your country alone.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Eleven Stories

“It’s actually sort of soothing to think of how massive the universe is, and how I could be snuffed out at any minute. I guess I like tricking my brain into disarming things.”
― Emily R. Austin, Interesting Facts about Space

“O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl— a bit like Crab Nebula— do for now.”
― Charles Olson

“The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Asserting that the universe sprang forth solely due to a scientific formula is just as radical as positing that a divine entity created it, given the enigmatic nature of the universe.”
― Isaiah Senones

“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”
― Francis Collins

“The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.”
― John Morley, Diderot and the encyclopædists, by John Viscount Morley. Volume v.2 1923 [Leather Bound]

“Life exists so the Universe can experience itself.”
― Steve Martin

“Science says we are made of stardust. What better link could there be between the universe and us? We are literally made of the cosmos. Why would we would not expect the universe to affect us profoundly in all possible ways?”
― Steve Madison, The Universe Has Your Back: Trust the Cosmos

“I guess reality doesn't have to bother to make sense of itself. Perhaps it's only humanity who'd try to impose such a feckless idea as reason.”
― Dan Watters, Lucifer, Vol. 4: The Devil at Heart

“God is the universal, intelligent, ever-growing life force. God was present when the universe burst into existence, and will survive when it destroys itself. God sparked evolution, and reaps expanded life force when creatures die—life force that is then recycled into ongoing evolution.”
― Kenneth B. Little, God's Intervention: A Second Chance for Humankind

“Lead with faith, not fear. Faith that everything is happening for you, not to you. Faith that you are being protected, not rejected. Faith that you are finding, not that you are lost. Faith that the Universe is working the you, not that you are alone or on your own. Faith that you are coming home, not that you are without a home”
― Farah Ayaad

“It is infinite and knows no boundary, the universe, and man's greed.”
― Emmanuel Apetsi