Cosmos Quotes

Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

Let man then contemplate nature in full and lofty majesty, and turn his eyes away from the mean objects which surround him. Let him look at the dazzling light hung aloft as an eternal lamp to lighten the universe; let him behold the earth, a mere dot compared with the vast circuit which that orb describes, and stand amazed to find that the vast circuit itself is but a very fine point compared with the orbit traced by the starts as they roll their course on high.

Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky. leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

And in the case of superior things like stars, we discover a kind of unity in separation. The higher we rise on the scale of being, the easier it is to discern a connection even among things separated by vast distances.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, All all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.

Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.

In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

The universal cosmic process was not created by any god or man.

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.

Just as the ocean is waving so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is.

How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.

For those who are awake, the Cosmos is One.

The wind-shak'd surge, with high and monstrous main,Seems to cast water on the burning Bear,And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole.

This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.