quotations about the Universe
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
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/u/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37
A Brief History of Time
There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
La monadologie
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
The universe is God's son.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Sun Watches the Sun
The Great Architect of the universe built it of good firm stuff.
JULES VERNE
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
The universe has no favourites; it is supremely just, and gives to every man his rightful earnings.
JAMES ALLEN
Byways of Blessedness
Will none wipe the sneer off the face of the cosmos?
POUL ANDERSON
The Broken Sword
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"
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
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Hide and Seek
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
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
There comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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
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"
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"
We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.
SEAN M. CARROLL
Scientific American, June 2008
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
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century
Asking what the universe is made of turns out to be the wrong question. We are trying to squeeze juice out of an illusion, and it won't work. The universe is made of what we want it to show us.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
You Are the Universe