Universe Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

A nebula is, as it were, a universe in the cocoon.

Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish. … The trouble is you won't fight. You've given up. But there's something just as inevitable as death. And that's life. Think of the power of the universe — turning the Earth, growing the trees. That's the same power within you — if you'll only have the courage and the will to use it.

Charlie Chaplin

Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easilyborn; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Truth, Goodness, Beauty — those celestial thrins,
Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,
With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,
Its joy confesses at their recent birth.

Henry David Thoreau

Words are flowing out
Like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass, they slip away
Across the universe

Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions.

Stephen Hawking

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

Bertrand Russell

It is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Thus our presence selects out from this vast array only these universes that are compatible without existence. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense, the lords of creation.

Stephen Hawking

We had a kettle; we let it leak: Our not repairing made it worse. We haven't had any tea for a week... The bottom is out of the Universe.

Rudyard Kipling

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood.

Henry David Thoreau

A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe: that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No explanation is required for Holy Writing. Whoso speaks truly is full of eternal life, and wonderfully related to genuine mysteries does his Writing appear to us, for it is a Concord from the Symphony of the Universe.

I saw within Its depth how It conceives all things in a single volume bound by Love, of which the universe is the scattered leaves.

Dante Alighieri

The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing?

Stephen Hawking

I believe in Darwin and God together. It's all one. It's all mysterious. Look at the universe. It's been here forever. It's totally impossible.

The universe is full of matter and force. Yet in all that force, amongst all the bulks and gravities, the rains of cosmic light, the bombardment of energy — how little spirit, how small the decimal points of intelligence.

The whole of theology, in regard to hell no less than to heaven, takes it for granted that Man is what is of most importance in the Universe of created beings. Since all theologians are men, this postulate has met with little opposition.

Bertrand Russell

There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.

I always think of myself as the best-looking guy and it is no secret that I love beautiful women. That is why I bought the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.

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 is no more than incipient change from a 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.

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.