quotations about the Universe
There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
La monadologie
The Great Architect of the universe built it of good firm stuff.
JULES VERNE
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nemesis"
He'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT
Good Omens
As far as I'm concerned ... the Universe is a junk yard, with everything overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain ... has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Sirens of Titan
Will none wipe the sneer off the face of the cosmos?
POUL ANDERSON
The Broken Sword
The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind -- a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house.
WOODY ALLEN
The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose
The universe is God's son.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Sun Watches the Sun
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
RACHEL CARSON
speech in Columbus, Ohio, April 21, 1954
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Hide and Seek
It was as if the universe itself stretched out its finger to touch me. And in touching me, singling me out, it only heightened my awareness of my own insignificance. That was somehow very comforting. When you confront the absolute indifference of magnitudes and vistas so overwhelming, the swollen ego of your own self-important suffering is diminished.
JOAN D. VINGE
"View from a Height"
I do not feel like an alien in the universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.
FREEMAN DYSON
Disturbing the Universe
There was a God, and He wasn't mean. His universe was a deadly contraption, but maybe there wasn't any way to build a universe that wasn't a deadly contraption -- like a square circle. He made the contraption, and He put Man in it, and Man was a fairly deadly contraption himself. But the funny part of it was, there wasn't a damn thing the universe could do to a man that man wasn't built to endure. He could even endure it when it killed him. And gradually he could get the better of it.
WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
"The Lineman"
The present-day universe is "out there," spanning immense distances and having little or no connection to how you live your daily life. But if everything you see around you needs your participation, then you are touched by the cosmos every minute of the day. To us, the biggest mystery is how human beings create their own reality--and then forget what they did.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
You Are the Universe
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
Cosmos
Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe
is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman
breathing hard and about to be hungry?
SARAH LINDSAY
"Honey"
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
RICHARD DAWKINS
River Out of Eden
[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.
SETH LLOYD
"PopSci Q & A: Seth Lloyd Talks Quantum Computing and Quoogling", Popular Science, November 4, 2011
The universe shows us the life of God, or rather it is in itself the life of God. We behold in it his permanent action, the scene upon which his power is exercised, and in which all his attributes are reflected. God is not out of the universe any more than the universe is out of God. God is the principle, the universe is the consequence, but a necessary consequence, without which the principle would be inert, unfruitful, impossible to conceive.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
God: Conferences Delivered at Notre Dame in Paris