#astronomy

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know. ↗

— Ann Druyan

#astronomy #atheism #carl-sagan #science #science

The Greek myths are a bit outdated, but not as much as the distant galaxies they remind me of whenever I look up at night. The historical and the scientific – two different aspects of the overactive imagination that fit together nicely in space. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #history #humor #imagination #myths

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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#inspirational #science #space-travel #inspirational

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies. ↗

— Tim Burton

#gluttony #humor #manners #humor

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#night-sky #science #stars #science

This sight... is by far the noblest astronomy affords. ↗

— Edmond Halley

#astronomy #far #noblest #sight