Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
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.
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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.
For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations. The beauty of the basic laws of natural science, as revealed in the study of particles and of the cosmos, is allied to the litheness of a merganser diving in a pure Swedish lake, or the grace of a dolphin leaving shining trails at night in the Gulf of California.
we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.
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 surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.
The world looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful and so fragile. Everybody, all of us down there, not only in Israel, have to keep it clean and good.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot'
The library connects us with the insight 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 our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.
Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
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.
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.
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