quotations about the Universe
The universe is the way it is. It's not going to be changed by supplications.
BUZZ ALDRIN
Esquire, January 2003
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.
POUL AUNDERSON
"Ghetto"
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
ALAN WATTS
attributed, The Book of Drugs: A Memoir
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Only 4 percent of our universe is made of ordinary matter like atoms and molecules. The other 96 percent is in entirely unfamiliar forms we know almost nothing about.
LINDA B. GLASER
"Spring Hans Bethe Lecture to explore 'Dark Universe'", Cornell Chronicle, April 12, 2017
I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions -- the world of spirits. I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
letter to Sister Mary James Power, October 1, 1934
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
No matter how big we may think we are, the universe is much bigger.
SALLY STEPHENS
"A look back at our pale, blue dot", San Francisco Examiner, May 7, 2017
What is the constitution of the universe? The universe is the manifestation of the divine thought; the thought of God embodies itself in the thought-forms that we call worlds.
ANNIE BESANT
The Immediate Future
All persons are contained within a single individual, just as all time is in a moment, and the entire universe is in a grain of sand.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
The great soul that sits on the throne of the universe is not, never was, and never will be, in a hurry.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
Gold-Foil
As I understand it, a universe is a ... well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Mr G: A Novel About the Creation
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
BRIAN COX
attributed, Black Holes are Souls
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
STEPHEN CRANE
War Is Kind and Other Poems
Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
WOODY ALLEN
My Philosophy
Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
An Abridgement by Katharine Hillard of The Secret Doctrine
The universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits should fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.
OLAF STAPLEDON
Star Maker
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, the mind itself being but a fact among others.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
Maybe there isn't a God after all, maybe there's only a universe rotating by itself like a millstone.
GAO XINGJIAN
The Other Shore