Space Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

A somewhat casual observer from outer space might well deduce that the course of evolution in this planet had produced a species of large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains; peculiar animals which rested when they sent their brains away from them but performed in rather predictable manner when their brains were recalled.

Kenneth Boulding

Space won't keep still, and it won't budge either: so give up trying.

It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

O never harm the dreaming world, the world of green, the world of leaves, but let its million palms unfold the adoration of the trees It is a love in darkness wrought obedient to the unseen sun, longer than memory, a thought deeper than the graves of time. The turning spindles of the cells weave a slow forest over space, the dance of love, creation, out of time moves not a leaf, and out of summer, not a shade.

When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to be found in outer space, nor any nebular debris - in those good old days...

Planning a good society as far ahead as one can see, does not mean that our adventures have ended; they have just begun. Human nature is growing up. As we put behind us the accidents and tears of childhood squabbles and the wooden swords and shields, and begin to try on our new space pilots' uniform, so to speak, we begin to see what we can teach ourselves and what we can really become with new self-control over new adult powers.

Easy contact was made on that fateful day with what obviously turned out to be a heretofore unknown type of UFO. I had hesitated for weeks to turn my cloudbuster pipes toward a "star," as if I had known that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. With the fading out of the two "stars," the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN. From then onward, too, our approach to the problem of space became positive, affirmative, confident in using our carefully screened data.

You are a spirit, then
a god,
full capable
of making space
and energy and time
and all things well.
And there you crouch, forgotten
to yourself and hidden from
the eyes of all
pretending there to be
a beast
that walks and eats and dies.

You should never send an expert to a movie about his specialty. Boxers hate boxing movies. Space buffs said 'Apollo 13' showed the wrong side of the moon. The British believe Mel Gibson's scholarship was faulty in 'Braveheart' merely because some of the key characters hadn't been born at the time of the story. 'Hackers' is, I have no doubt, deeply dubious in the computer science department. While it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie.

When faced with a loss, it is no use trying to recover what has gone. On the other hand, a great space has been opened up in your life - there it lies, empty, waiting to be filled with something new. At the moment of one's loss, contradictory as this might seem, one is being given a large slice of freedom.

But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

And there he saw a door within the wall,
Well-hinged, close shut; nor was there in that place
Another on its hinges, therefore he
Stood there and pondered for a little space
And thought: "Perchance some marvel I shall see,
For surely here some dweller there must be,
Because this door seems whole and new and sound,
While nought but ruin I can see around".

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

Kenneth Boulding

A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week — he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below... My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words, "The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our life-time."

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon

A body can only act immediately on what it is in contact with; it must be by the action of contiguous particles—that is, practically, through a continuous medium, that force can be transmitted across space.

Don't you see what's at stake here? The ultimate aim of all science — to penetrate the unknown. Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies of outer space? The greatest mystery is right here, right under our feet.

Wilderness is threatened everywhere. The extinction of animals is not the only danger; man faces the loss of a breathing space for all that is wild and free in his spirit. And not only his spirit, his physical welfare also, even his survival, is imperiled by the extermination of other life on this planet.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When we analyze the highly refined concept of space used by mathematicians we find it to be quite similar to the concept of number.

Gilbert N. Lewis

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In nearly all the papers, all composure was lost. The critics would begin by saying: there is no need to devote much space to the Cubists, who are utterly without importance, and then they furiously gave them seven columns out of the ten that were taken up, at that time, by the Salon.

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Marshall McLuhan

Friends and fellow citizens, I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.

Frederick Douglass

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