Quotes about the universe

That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.

It was a glaring omission, a sign of cosmic sloppiness. Not even that, Vasko corrected himself. It was a sign of cosmic obliviousness. The universe didn’t know what was happening here. It didn’t know and it didn’t care. It didn’t even know that it didn’t know.

To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.

Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.

They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart.

He had never lost that mingled combination of awe and terror that welled up in him when confronted by the routinely huge distances of space.

“I imagine you feel insignificant,” Sajaki said, almost as if he had been listening in on the conversation. “Well; you’re justified in feeling that way. You are insignificant. That’s the majesty of this place. Would you choose it any other way?”

The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace.

In reality, the universe is neutral about our existence. Only dogs care.

Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.

I believe that the main lesson of relativity and quantum theory is that the world is nothing but an evolving network of relationships.

The vastness of the universe-and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable-is out of reach to the arrogant.

A great tree grew up, one with many branches, and six times it was almost felled. But still it grows and we are but one small branch, one that cannot live without its tree. And slowly, we learned to read the book of nature, to learn its laws, to nurture the tree. To find out where and when we are in the great ocean, to become a way for the cosmos to know itself and to return to the stars.