quotations about the Universe
Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
WOODY ALLEN
My Philosophy
The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest.
MARC SCOTT ZICREE
"Survivors", Babylon 5
As I understand it, a universe is a ... well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Mr G: A Novel About the Creation
The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle -- another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.
CARL SAGAN
Contact: A Novel
The universe has a sense of irony, and sometimes you get reminded just how sadistic that can be.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Narcissus in Chains
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
STEPHEN CRANE
War Is Kind and Other Poems
Even atheistic scientists will wax lyrical about the scale, the majesty, the harmony, the elegance, the sheer ingenuity of the universe of which they form so small and fragile a part.... Science reveals that there is a coherent scheme of things, but scientists do not necessarily interpret that as evidence for meaning or purpose in the universe.
PAUL DAVIES
Cosmic Jackpot
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
We are not lords of the universe. We're one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshipping it with our attention.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Red Mars
The universe has no favourites; it is supremely just, and gives to every man his rightful earnings.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
The universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level. The novelty, the new, more complex order, doesn't emerge from the present in a steady stream, nor at all places at the same rate. It comes, as all things do, in rhythmic waves; there will always be times and places of scarcity and stagnation and retrogression. Still, the long-term direction is clear. The intention of the universe is evolution.
GEORGE LEONARD
The Silent Pulse
There is a universe out there, a universe of life, objects, and events. There are differences, but it is all the same universe, and we all must obey the same universal laws.
BARRY B. LONGYEAR
"Enemy Mine"
Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
The basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is looking like a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation in a way that defies our old mechanistic model of the universe--as though our expectation itself causes our energy to flow out into the world and affect other energy systems.
JAMES REDFIELD
The Celestine Prophecy
We see the universe as it is ... and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
"The Way of the Cross and Dragon"
It is our station to live within laws that give us being, but offer of themselves no purpose or promise, no triumph as a species. The universe allows us a place in its systematic workings but only cares for the system itself, not us.
GREGORY BENFORD
"Starswarmer"
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
STEPHEN HAWKING
Der Spiegel, October 17, 1988
There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
La monadologie