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universe quotes

  • The Answer to the Great Question Of†Life, the Universe and Everything†Is†Forty-two.

    - Douglas Noe«  l Adams
      The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ch.27.

  • I am a free man, I do not need to copy Petrarch or Boccaccio. My own genius is enough. Let others worry themselves about style and so cease to be themselves. Without a master, without a model, without a guide, without artifice,Igotowork and earnmy living, my well- being, and my fame.What do Ineedmore? Witha goose quill and a few sheets of paper I mock the universe.

    - Pietro Aretino
    Quoted in  J H Plumb (ed)  The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (1961, new edn by Penguin,1982).

  •    esta   dema  s decirte que a esta altura no creo en predicadores ni en generales ni en las nalgas de miss universo ni en el arrepentimiento de los verdugos ni en el catecismo del confort ni en el flaco perdo  n de dios. It's not useless to tell you that, at this stage, I don't believe in preachers or generals or in Miss Universe's buttocks or in the executioner's repentance or in the catechism of comfort or in God's slim forgiving.

    - Mario Benedetti
      Poemas de otros,'Credo' ('Creed').

  • Mancannot livewithout seeking todescribeand explain the universe.

    - Sir Isaiah Berlin
      In the Sunday Times.

  • Our sun is one of100 billion stars in our galaxy.Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe.It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.

    -Wernher von Braun
      In the NewYork Times, 29  Apr.

  •    How true it is, that there isnothing dead inthis Universe; that what we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse order! 'The leaf that lies rotting in moist winds,'says one,'has still force; else how could it rot?'

    -Thomas Carlyle
      History of the French Revolution, vol.2, bk.3, ch.1.

  • The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe.

    -John Coltrane
      Quoted in sleeve-note to the re-issue of Coltrane's Sound (originally published1961).

  • A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,'replied the universe, 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.'

    - Stephen Crane
      A Man Said to the Universe.

  • We doctors know a hopeless case iflisten: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go

    - e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings cummings
    1x1, no.14.

  • I believe that there are15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605, 653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231, 425,076,185,631,031,296 protonsintheuniverse, and the same number of electrons.

    - SirArthur Stanley Eddington
       Tarner Lecture.

  • My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      The Temptation of St  Antony.

  • L'univers†je l'en estime plus depuis que je sais qu'il ressemble a'   une montre; il est surprenant que l'ordre de la nature, tout admirable qu'il est, ne roule que sur des choses si simples. I have come to esteem the universe more now that I know it resembles a watch; it is surprising that the order of nature, as admirable as it is, only runs on such simple things.

    - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
      Entretiens sur la pluralite   des mondes.

  • Ulysses†is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
      Of  James  Joyce's1922 novel.  Aspects of the Novel, ch.6.

  • Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
    Two Cheers for Democracy,'Art for  Art's Sake'.

  • A golfcourse isthe epitome of all that ispurely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quicklyas possible.

    - (Hippolyte) Jean Giraudoux
      Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  • Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

    -J(ohn) B(urdon) S(anderson) Haldane
      Possible Worlds and Other Essays,'Possible Worlds'.

  • There was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe.

    -Thomas Hardy
      The Mayor of Casterbridge, ch.1.

  • What we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith.Themore weknowofthelaws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to beand the non-necessity of it.

    -Thomas Hardy
      Letter to Edward Clodd, 27 Feb.

  • What isitthat breathes fire intothe equations and makes a universe for them to describe† Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

    - StephenWilliam Hawking
      A Brief History of  Time, ch.11.

  • Universitas in modo citharae sit disposita, in qua diversa genera in modo chordarum sit consonantia. The universe is arranged like a cithera, in which different kinds of things sound together harmoniously, just as they do in a chord.

    -Honorius of Autun
    c.1120  Liber Duodecem Questionum, ch.2.

  •    Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.

    - David Hume
      A  Treatise of Human Nature, bk.1, pt.2, section 6.

  • There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      Time Must Have a Stop.

  • O God! Put backThy universe and give me yesterday.

    - HenryArthur Jones
      The Silver King (with Henry Herman), act 2, sc.4.

  • His soul swooned slowlyas he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descentoftheir lastend, uponall theliving and the dead.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
      Dubliners,'The Dead'.

  • The cold reaches of the universe must not become the new area of an even colder war.

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
      Address to the United Nations, 25 Sep.

  • Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?

    -Thomas S(amuel) Kuhn
      The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

  • Une ample Come  die a'   cent actes divers, Et dont la sce'  ne est l'Univers. A grand comedy in one hundred different acts, On the stage of the universe.

    -Jean de La Fontaine
      Fables, pt.5, no.1,'Le bu"   cheron et Mercure'.

  • The love of our neighbour is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescence out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.

    - George MacDonald
      Unspoken Sermons.

  • ‚Robaron los conquistadores una pa  gina al Universo! Aquellos eran los pueblos que llamaban a laV|a La  ctea'el camino de las almas'; para quienes el Universo estaba lleno del Grande Esp|ritu, en cuyo seno se encerraba toda luz. The conquistadores stole a page from the Universe! Those were the good people who called the Milky Way 'the souls'path'; for them the Universe was full of the Great Spirit, within which all light was contained.

    -Jose Mart| 
      Obra literaria,'El hombre antiguo de  Ame  rica y sus artes primitivas' ('Ancient Man in  America and his Primitive  Arts').

  • If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural; the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.

    -John Stuart Mill
      Auguste Comte and Positivism.

  • The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      The Cosmological Eye,'An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere'.

  • He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said,'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds This be thy just circumference,O world.'

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.225^31.

  • The scientific attitude implies†the postulate of objectivitythat is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan; that there is no intention in the universe.

    -Jacques Monod
      Le Hasard et la Nece  ssite  .

  • When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining togetheras one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

    -John Muir
    Travels in  Alaska, ch.1,'The Puget Sound and British Columbia' (published1915).

  • Nothing is accidental in the universethis is one of my Laws of Physicsexceptthe entire universeitself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

    -Myles na Gopaleen
      Do WhatYou Will,'The Summing-Up: Meredith Dawe'.

  • Notforalltheuniversecontainswould I, inthestrugglefor what I conceive to be my country's cause, consent to the effusion of a single drop of human blood, except myown.

    - Daniel known as  the Liberator O'Connell
      Speech,18 Feb.

  • Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix ex aliis alias reddit natura figuras. nec perit in toto quidquam, mihi credite, mundo, sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante, morique, desinere illud idem. cum sint huc forsitan illa, haec translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant. No species remains constant: that great renovator of matter Nature, endlessly fashions new forms from old: there's nothing in the whole universe that perishes, believe me; rather it renews and varies its substance. What we describe as birth isno morethan incipient change froma prior state, while dying is merely to quit it. Though the parts may be transported hither and thither, the sum of all matter is constant.

    -Ovid full name Publius OvidiusNaso   4317
    Metamorphoses, bk.15, l.252^8 (translated by Peter Green).

  • Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and non-living matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind.It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeplyconcernus. Scienceshowsuswhat existsbut not what to do about it.

    - Heinz R(udolf) Pagels
      The Dreams of Reason. US writer, Professor of Humanities  at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.  Her  works  include  Sexual  Personae  (1990)  and Vamps andTramps (1994).

  • It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only theapplication of themthat is human. Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable asthose by whichthe universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

    -Thomas Paine
      TheAge of Reason, pt.1.

  • When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of [the] universe, every phase of present or past lifetherein, has been examined, classified, and coordinatedwith the rest, thenthemissionof sciencewill be completed.What isthisbut saying thatthetaskof science canneverend till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

    - Karl Pearson
      The Grammar of Science, pt.1, ch.5.

  • Se"   plural como o universo! Be plural, like the universe!

    - Fernando Anto  nio Nogueira Pessoa
    Pa  ginas IŁ  ntimas e deAuto-interpreta c° a‹  o.

  • Togrowolder istorealizetheuniverseisCopernican, not Ptolemaic, and that self and the loved one do not form the epicentre of the solar system.

    - Edward O Phillips
      Sunday Best.

  • Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answerscan, asa rule, be knowntobetrue, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

    - Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
      The Problems of Philosophy, ch.14.

  • Il n'y a pas d'autre univers qu'un univers humain, l'univers de la subjectivite   humaine. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

    -Jean-Paul Sartre
      L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism and Humanism,1948) (translated by Philip Mairet).

  • No one ever complains if a great artist says that he was driven to create a masterpiece by a hunger for recognition and money.But a scientist? Well, he ismeant to be disinterested, pure, his ambition merely to descry the cement of the universe. He isn't meant to use it to start laying his own patio.

    -Will Self
    The QuantityTheory of Insanity and Five Supporting Propositions,'The QuantityTheory of Insanity'.

  • He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      Prometheus Unbound, act 2, sc.4, l.72^3.

  • Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

    -John Ernest Steinbeck
      The Grapes ofWrath, ch.14.

  • This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'TheTwoVoices', stanza 9, l.25^7.

  • I saw the flaring atom-streams And torrents of her myriad universe, Ruining along the illimitable inane Fly on to clash together again, and make Another and another frame of things For ever.

    -Tennyson
      'Lucretius',1.38^40.

  • In terms ofcommunication,Japan isliketheblack hole of the universe. It receives signals but does not emit them.

    -Tadao Umaseo
    Quoted in David Halberstam The Reckoning (1986).

  • In this universe, Where the least things control the greatest, where The faintest breath that breathes can move a world.

    -William Wordsworth
    ^6  Oswald.The Borderers, act 3,1.1562^4 (published1842).

  • Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou soul, that art the eternity of thought, And giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion.

    -William Wordsworth
      'Influenceof NaturalObjects', l.1^4 (publishedinTheFriend 28 Dec1809).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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