Quotes about the universe

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.

There was no center, no reason. Courtney’s death was random, banal viciousness inflicted by one organism upon another. There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires.

He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.

I suppose I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own existence. ...I went about it in a more indirect way: I set about trying to understand the entire Universe.

Physics will always be, at its core, about understanding our place in the Universe...

Five years earlier... [a]s my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the true wonder of this designated "dark sky site" revealed itself. ...The stars and planets weren't up there and I wasn't down here: it was all part of one enormous physical system called the Universe. I was a part of it too. ...I'd never really felt my place in it until that moment.

Colonizing space with enormous rockets will almost certainly not be a lifeline for them. For if they haven't learned to live here, how can they possibly survive in the distant Beyond? (XV)

After the second dinner, [he] blew out a candle. In the darkness, the stars and Milky Way lit up. No one noticed the electricity was turned off. The people all stood in front of the map of the universe, amazed by the lights on the wall. It was something, it really was, everyone thought. It was a fine, strong feeling, being there together with the stars lit up before them. Even if things were going wrong, the bad feelings disappeared in front of those stars. They wanted to touch each other that night and hold hands. (p 176)

A few stars had been let out early. Teppic looked up at them. Perhaps, he thought, there is life somewhere else. On the stars, maybe. If it's true that there are billions of universes stacked alongside one another, the thickness of a thought apart, then there must be people elsewhere.

"Maybe one of the worst things that we can do is to diminish the possibility of the universe in our insistence on our description of it."

He has looked long at the stars, and that is the beginning of wisdom.