quotations about the Universe
Today we no longer regard the universe as the cause of our own undeserved troubles but perhaps, on the contrary, as the last refuge from the mismanagement of our earthly affairs.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
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
He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.
POUL AUNDERSON
"Ghetto"
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
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
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
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
I look out upon the universe and I see that it is a universe, a variety in unity. I see that there is a unity in all the phenomena of nature, and that science has more and more made that unity clear, and I see that there is one Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. And I see too, it seems to me very clearly, that this Energy is an intellectual Energy; that is, that the physical phenomena of the universe are intellectually related to one another. The scientist does not create the relations; he finds them. They are; he discovers them. All science is thinking the thoughts of God after him. It is finding thought where thought has done its intellectual work; it is learning what are those intellectual relationships which have been in and are embodied in creation.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Seeking After God
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
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
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
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
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
BRIAN COX
attributed, Black Holes are Souls
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
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
We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", Other Inquisitions
Naturally, every scientist has an "I" and a personal life. But in the models of reality developed by physics and modern science in general, the universe is a third-party experience. As John Archibald Wheeler famously said, it's as if we look at the universe through a foot-thick piece of glass when what we should be doing is breaking the glass.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
You Are the Universe
From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.
JAMES JEANS
The Mysterious Universe
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
Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
WOODY ALLEN
My Philosophy