“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“I've always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“Anything you don't understand, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as... ..cultivated.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“What worries me the most,' she continued, 'is the opposite, the possibility that they're not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they're not doing it because they don't see any point to it. It's like..."--she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass--"like the ants. They occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they're very well aware of their environment. But we don't try to communicate with them. So I don't think they have the foggiest notion that we exist.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year- old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“These are the folks who brought us the hydrogen bomb. Forgive me, Lord, for not being more grateful to these kind souls”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“...You think if I haven't had your religious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think, his god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years -- hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news?”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
“Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Contact
Carl Sagan
Born place: in New York, The United States
Born date November 9, 1934
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“It just goes to show that what one person considers a "bad attitude" might actually just be total frustration over being pushed beyond the brink of one's mental and physical endurance.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Party Princess
“To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Mandarins
“In today’s safety culture we seem to swing from strictly monitoring and guiding our children from infancy through high school, and then releasing them to the absolute freedom of college (though some parents are trying to encroach there as well). We have to remember that for most of human history adolescents took on adult roles earlier and rose admirably to the challenge. Many of the problems we have with teenagers result from failing to adequately challenge their growing brains. While we now know that the brain’s decision-making areas aren’t completely wired until at least their early twenties, it is experience-making decisions that wires them, and it can’t be done without taking some risks. We need to allow children to try and fail. And when they do make the stupid, shortsighted decisions that come from inexperience, we need to let them suffer the results. At the same time we also need to provide balance by not setting policies that will magnify one mistake, like drug use or fighting, into a life-derailing catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is exactly what our current “zero tolerance” policies—that expel children from school for just one rule violation—do.”
― Bruce D. Perry, quote from The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook
“We can’t help what we feel,” Deep said roughly. “How can we help wanting you between us, beautiful little Kat? How can we help wanting to fill you again?” Somehow Kat knew he wasn’t talking about filling her with his mind this time. No, this time he and Lock wanted more. Much more. And that scared the ever loving crap out of her. “Just stay the night,” Lock urged quietly when she didn’t speak. “Don’t listen to Deep, we won’t bother you—you can have the bed all to yourself if you like.” The thought of getting anywhere near their bed, even if she was the only one in it, gave Kat a bad case of the butterflies. “No, you guys take the bed,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll take the door, I’m leaving.” “No!” Deep moved to block her way again but Lock held him back. “Go then, my lady,” he said and she could feel his sorrow like an ache in her heart. “We won’t try to stop you. Only please, stay away from the unmated males’ territory.” “Look, I don’t care where I go right now as long as I can get away from the two of you and…and your feelings!” Kat knew she was being cruel but she couldn’t help herself—she was drowning in emotions that weren’t hers. It felt like a giant hand was gripping her, squeezing her for all it was worth and she couldn’t breathe…couldn’t breathe… Deep”
― Evangeline Anderson, quote from Hunted
“Julius rose to his feet. The towel dropped, showering cut brown hair over Monna Alessandra's elegant tiles. His hair, finely tailored, clung to a thick-boned face with slanting eyes and a blunt profile which would have looked well on a coin. Tobie, who had almost no hair, gazed at him sadly.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from The Spring of the Ram
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The Minds of Billy M...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
