Top Quotes from Carl Sagan

About Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, a visionary scientist, eloquent communicator, and cosmic philosopher, emerged as an influential figure who brought the wonders of the universe closer to our hearts and minds. Born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, Sagan's life was dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos and sharing the profound beauty of science with the world.

At the core of Carl Sagan's brilliance was his exceptional ability to translate complex scientific concepts into accessible and captivating narratives. His gift for storytelling and evocative prose allowed him to bridge the gap between the esoteric world of astrophysics and the imaginations of people from all walks of life. With every word he spoke or wrote, Sagan conveyed a contagious passion for science, inspiring generations to explore the wonders of the universe and marvel at the interconnectedness of all living beings.

As we gaze at the stars that once inspired Carl Sagan's wonder, we are reminded of his profound impact on science, culture, and the collective imagination. He remains an eternal beacon, guiding us to seek knowledge, to embrace our cosmic origins, and to cherish the fragile and precious nature of our existence in this vast, awe-inspiring cosmos.

Carl Sagan Quotes

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“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

“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”

― Carl Sagan

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

― Carl Sagan

“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

― Carl Sagan

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

― Carl Sagan

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

― Carl Sagan

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

― Carl Sagan

“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.”

― Carl Sagan

“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

― Carl Sagan

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

― Carl Sagan

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

― Carl Sagan

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”

― Carl Sagan

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

― Carl Sagan

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

― Carl Sagan

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

― Carl Sagan

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

― Carl Sagan

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

― Carl Sagan

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

― Carl Sagan

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”

― Carl Sagan

“We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.”

― Carl Sagan

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

― Carl Sagan

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

― Carl Sagan

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”

― Carl Sagan

“We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.”

― Carl Sagan

“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“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. ”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”

― Carl Sagan

“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”

― Carl Sagan

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

― Carl Sagan

“We're in very bad trouble if we don't understand the planet we're trying to save.”

― Carl Sagan

“No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.”

― Carl Sagan

“When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.”

― Carl Sagan

“It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.”

― Carl Sagan

“Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”

― Carl Sagan

“The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this planet - it's my favorite.”

― Carl Sagan

“For any human being in existence to think that there is nothing in the whole world superior to himself would be an insane piece of arrogance.”

― Carl Sagan

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

― Carl Sagan

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past--some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.”

― Carl Sagan

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

― Carl Sagan

“I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.”

― Carl Sagan

“It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

“It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopedias' Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?”

― Carl Sagan

“Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival.”

― Carl Sagan

“If the dinosaurs had had a space program, they would not be extinct.”

― Carl Sagan

“A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?”

― Carl Sagan

“Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs--in time, in space, and in potential-- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”

― Carl Sagan

“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.”

― Carl Sagan

“Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.”

― Carl Sagan

“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

More Quotes on: Nikola Tesla Quotes for the Genius Inside You

                             Top Quotes from J. Robert Oppenheimer