Space quotations

Page 3

◆ If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

- Bertrand Russell99

◆ Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

- Haruki Murakami99

◆ Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

- Orhan Pamuk99

◆ The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

- Eckhart Tolle99

◆ Love gives you wings. Icarus and the Challenger both had wings, and so did my first love letter, after I folded it up and flung it at my crush.?

- Jarod Kintz99

◆ Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.

- D.T. Suzuki99

◆ One word I'd use to describe space is lonely. The only way I'll board a space shuttle is if I had a babysitter with me. You know, to watch the baby I'll make with her.?

- Jarod Kintz99

◆ It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

- Neil Armstrong99

◆ I think the best time to stare off into space is when you're going 65 on a motorcycle, provided you're wearing your astronaut's helmet.

- Jarod Kintz99

◆ I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

- E.B. White99

◆ At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.

- Isabel Allende99

◆ When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, 'There is no God.' The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed. Mankind used to think that the dews and rains were sent for their benefit, and the church still encourages this idea by praying for rain in times of drought, but the notion is nearly dissipated.

- John Burroughs99

◆ Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

- Carl Sagan99

◆ Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

- Carl Sagan99

◆ A good traveller is one who knows how to travel with the mind.

- Michael Bassey Johnson99