Carl Sagan quotes - page 14

I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space. (Carl Sagan)
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together. View quote
Carl Sagan
The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality. View quote
Carl Sagan
The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. View quote
Carl Sagan
It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. View quote
Carl Sagan
Science is [...] a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. View quote
Carl Sagan
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. View quote
Carl Sagan
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. View quote
Carl Sagan
If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space. View quote
Carl Sagan
To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever. View quote
Carl Sagan
And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life. (Carl Sagan)
We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. View quote
Carl Sagan
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. View quote
Carl Sagan
My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. View quote
Carl Sagan
What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos. View quote
Carl Sagan
I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. View quote
Carl Sagan
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. View quote
Carl Sagan
The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history. View quote
Carl Sagan
This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. View quote
Carl Sagan
Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. View quote
Carl Sagan
All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few. (Carl Sagan)
In many cultures, the customary answer is that a God or Gods created the Universe out of nothing. But if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: where did God come from? If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the Universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step, and conclude that the Universe always existed? That there's no need for a creation, it was always here. These are not easy questions. Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, questions that were once treated only in religion and myth. View quote
Carl Sagan
As a boy Kepler had been captured by a vision of cosmic splendour, a harmony of the worlds which he sought so tirelessly all his life. View quote
Carl Sagan
I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. View quote
Carl Sagan
They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. View quote
Carl Sagan