Consider again 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 civilisation, 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.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
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. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl SaganAmerican astrophysicist, cosmologist and author1934 - 1996
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realisation that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Alan WattsBritish American author and lecturer1915 - 1973
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
Last words aboard the sinking Lusitania (1915), as reported by the survivor Rita Jolivet.
Frohman produced Peter Pan, whose hero says 'To die will be an awfully big adventure.'
Last words aboard the sinking Lusitania (1915), as reported by the survivor Rita Jolivet.
Frohman produced Peter Pan, whose hero says 'To die will be an awfully big adventure.'
He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.
To me his prose is unreadable; like Jane Austin's. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.
Mary Louise Bell
Cited on her divorce complaint form when separating from Richard Feynman
Mary Louise Bell
Cited on her divorce complaint form when separating from Richard Feynman
Tempt me no more; for I
Have known the lightning’s hour,
The poet’s inward pride,
The certainty of power.
From 'Tempt Me No More' : Day Lewis, C. (1935). Collected poems, 1929-1933. New York: Random House.
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard DawkinsEnglish ethologist, evolutionary biologist and authorborn 1941