“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. ”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.
[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Cosmos
Carl Sagan
Born place: in New York, The United States
Born date November 9, 1934
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“I don’t even know if the sun will rise or whether I’ll wake up in the morning. I don’t know if God will grant me my next breath. So I choose to live on faith rather than knowledge—and accept whatever comes, welcome or not, bitter or sweet—all of it, a gift from God.”
― Dan Millman, quote from The Journeys of Socrates
“I'll bet every fucking one of your angels is going to be terrifying!”
― John Irving, quote from In One Person
“The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
“I watch James's face. His expression is an open book to me, because I took the time to learn the language many years ago.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
“Instead of being wakened to the sound of birdsong, like princesses in books, I was wakened to the sound of Rommel shrieking as Fat Louie beat him senseless for getting into his bowl of Fancy Feast.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Princess in Pink
Kick, Push
Dusk
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Magnolia
Till We Have Faces:...
AquariumBookQuoters 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.
