#cosmos

I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase--nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it. ↗

— R.J. Anderson

#cosmos #inspirational #life #music #space

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights 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 of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. 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

#inspirational

Other times, you're doing some piece of work and suddenly you get feedback that tells you that you have touched something that is very alive in the cosmos. ↗

— Leonard Nimoy

#cosmos #doing #feedback #get #other

We are the first generation of human beings to have substantial insights into the origin of our cosmos and of human life in it. ↗

— Arthur Peacocke

#cosmos #first #generation #human #human beings

Divorced from the cosmos, from nature, from society and from each other, we have become fractured and fragmented. ↗

— Daisaku Ikeda

#cosmos #divorced #each #fractured #fragmented

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#carl-sagan #cosmos #age

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

— Carl Sagan

#beauty #cosmos #philosophy #science #universe

[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea. ↗

— Carl Sagan as Ellie Arroway

#space-and-cosmos #wonder #beauty

Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics. ↗

— Shannon Celebi

#apparitional #dead #death #death-and-dying #eye

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

#cosmology #cosmos #hindu #vedantism #vedas