The Infinite Library

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. 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. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

“In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie. [Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]”

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

“The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)”

“What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.”

“One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.”

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

“The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.”

“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”

“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”

“National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.”

“The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.”

“The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.”

“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is co-ordinated and used. Still, the amount of information to which we have accessed is one index of our intelligence.”

“The cosmos was discovered only yesterday. For a million years it was clear to everyone that there were no other places than the earth. Then in the last tenth of a percent of the lifetime of our species, in the instant between Aristarchus and ourselves, we reluctantly noticed that we were not the centre and purpose of the universe, but rather lived on a tiny and fragile world lost in immensity and eternity, drifting in a great cosmic ocean dotted here and there with a hundred billion galaxies and a billion trillion stars.”

“By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.”

“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”

“And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.”

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”

“Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who called themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.”

“I do not want to believe. I want to know.”

“We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.”

“Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.”

“The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.”

“If you had walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890's, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world.”

“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.”

“The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.”

“Lost somewhere between the eternity of time and immensity of space is our tiny planetary home”

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“Çağımızın üçüncü dünya sorunlarından en önemlisi, okumuş sınıfların zengin çocukları olması, bunların da statükonun sürüp gitmesinden çıkarları bulunması ve kol işçiliğine yatkın olmadıktan başka, alışılmış bilgi sınırlarını aşmak için meydan okumaya kalkışmamalarıdır. Bilimin kök salması çok yavaş gerçekleşiyor.”

“Hiçbir uygarlık, topluluktaki doğumların sayısını sınırlandırmadan yıldızlar arası yolculuk çabalarının üstesinden gelemez”

“Çok bilmek, çok zeki olmakla eş değer değildir. Akıl yalnızca bilgi demek değildir, aynı zamanda yargıdır da. Başka bir deyişle, bilgiler arasında bağlantı kurup bunları kullanmaktır.”

“Güneş'in yapısında önce helyum bulunduğu saptanmıştır.(Yunanlıların güneş tanrısına Helios adını vermeleri nedeniyle helyum denilmiştir.)”

“70 milyon yıl, bunun ancak milyonda birine eşit bir süre yaşayabilen insan için ne ifade eder? Yalnızca bir güncük uçan ve günü sonsuzmuş gibi algılayan kelebeklere benziyoruz”

“En basit yapılı tek hücreli organizma bile en mükemmel cep saatinden daha karmaşık bir makinedir.”

“Evrim bir kuram değil bir olgudur.”

“Kozmos ''düzen içinde bir evren'' anlamında kullanılan Yunanca bir sözcüktür ve bir bakıma ''karmaşa'' anlamına gelen Kaos'un karşıtıdır.”

“Göz önünde tutmak'' anlamındaki İngilizce ''consider'' sözcüğünün köken anlamı şudur: ''Gezegene bakarak konuşmak.'' Gezegenlere bakarak konuşmaksa oldukça ciddi bir işti.”

“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.”

“There’s as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe.”