Universe Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

Henry David Thoreau

Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn't have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God's days are very, very long?

Raymond Chandler

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

Time refuses to be simplified or reduced. You cannot say that it is only found in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in everyone imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. It is all of these things.

Stephen Hawking

A million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.

Stephen Hawking

That so much time was wasted in this pain.
Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down
To not return again!
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
The Fool is me!
And with one final shake of laughter
Breaks his bonds.
The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
To give himself what no one else can give:
His liberty.

The compass opened, if I may so express myself, the universe.

The universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship (angels). Behind the harsh appearance of the world there is a benign power.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think the universe is completely self-contained. It doesn't have any beginning or end, it doesn't have any creation or destruction.

Stephen Hawking

There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?

Stephen Hawking

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".

If the universe is so bad... how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?

When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat, and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe.

It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'

Power is what they want, not candy-power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought; which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Stephen Hawking

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.

Henry David Thoreau

We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

But we are not dedicating or building any Capitol or Pyramid to human Pride, but found a holy temple in the human Intellect, on the model of the Universe... For whatever is worthy of Existence is worthy of Knowledge-which is the Image (or Echo) of Existence.

Cookie: What are you sad about?
Harry: I'm spiritually bankrupt. I'm empty.
Cookie: What do you mean?
Harry: I'm frightened. I got no soul, you know what I mean? Let me put it this way: when I was younger it was less scary waiting for Lefty than it is waiting for Godot.
Cookie: You lost me!
Harry: You know that the universe is coming apart? You know about that? You know what a black hole is?
Cookie: Yeah. That's how I make my living.

My mother Earth!
And thou fresh breaking Day, and you, ye Mountains,
Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.
And thou, the bright eye of the universe,
That openest over all, and unto all
Art a delight—thou shin'st not on my heart.

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally.

The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!

Friedrich Nietzsche

For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.