I was making a selection of quotes that I truly adore, and this came out:
“We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself”
― Carl Sagan
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
― Carl Sagan
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein
“Know yourself to improve yourself.”
― Auguste Comte
“Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.”
― Auguste Comte
“To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity.”
― Auguste Comte
“In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws-that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts.”
― Auguste Comte
“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking!”
― Marvin Minsky
“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”
― Marvin Minsky
“In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we’ll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don’t—and bit by bit we’ll rebuild ourselves. I don’t think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don’t much like how people are now. We’re too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves.”
― Marvin Minsky
“Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to ‘discover’ that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.”― Marvin Minsky
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”
― H. G. Wells
“Our true nationality is mankind.”
― H.G. Wells
“We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. ”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
“It is the struggle itself that is most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will not reach our ultimate goal. The effort itself yields its own reward.”
― Gene Roddenberry
“The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.”
― Gene Roddenberry
“Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly herd it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future
“Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
“Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future
“Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary
and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism
abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures,
more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its
contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we
have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the
curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the decades pass,
no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social
order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to
frustration.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“The true goal of human activity was the creation of a world-wide community of awakened and intelligently creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
“The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“Sooner or later for good or ill, a united mankind, equipped with science and power, will probably turn its attention to the other planets, not only for economic exploitation, but also as possible homes for man. . . . The goal for the solar system would seem to be that it should become an interplanetary community of very diverse worlds . . . . Through the pooling of this wealth of experience, through this ‘commonwealth of worlds,’ new levels of mental and spiritual development should become possible, levels at present quite inconceivable to man.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“The individual in whom the will for the light is strong and clear finds his heart inextricably bound up with the struggle of the forces of light in his native place and time. Much as he may long for the opportunity of fuller self- expression in a happier world, he knows that for him self-expression is impossible save in the world in which his mind is rooted. The individual in whom the will for the light is weak soon persuades himself that his opportunity lies elsewhere.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the human spirit’s manifold potentialities.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“He should avail himself of their resources in such ways as to advance the expression of the spirit in the life of mankind. He should use them so as to afford to every human being the greatest possible opportunity for developing and expressing his distinctively human capacity as an instrument of the spirit, as a centre of sensitive and intelligent awareness of the objective universe, as a centre of love of all lovely things, and of creative action for the spirit.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.”
― Olaf Stapledon
“In that instant when I had seen… the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos. …”
― Olaf Stapledon
