Selected space quotes

1. All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

2. Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.

3. Space is the breath of art.

4. The space within becomes the reality of the building.

5. Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

6. The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward.

7. There is very little difference between men and women in space.

8. I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

9. You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in.

10. You may have trouble getting permission to aero or lithobrake asteroids on Earth.

11. About First Landing by Robert Zubrin: Someday I'd like to read a story about competent people on Mars.

12. I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.

13. Space is the stature of God.

14. Space is to place as eternity is to time.

15. The Infinite has to be a relative concept. Go any distance: an infinite space means that there is more to be explored.

16. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

17. Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.

18. Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

19. Secrets of the cosmos will begin to unravel. I, for one, can't wait.

20. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

21. The future is in the skies.

22. That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

23. Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

24. Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

25. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

26. I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.

27. Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points.

28. To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

29. I'm moving to Mars next week, so if you have any boxes...

30. What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

31. How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

32. I first saw the site for Disneyland back in 1953, In those days it was all flat land - no rivers, no mountains, no castles or rocket ships - just orange groves, and a few acres of walnut trees.

33. A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

34. The greatest gain from space travel consists in the extension of our knowledge. In a hundred years this newly won knowledge will pay huge and unexpected dividends.

35. Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

36. Sometimes I need what only you can provide -- your absence.

37. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.

38. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

39. Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring - not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

40. All these relics gave... Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, - all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.

41. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.

42. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.

43. The wealth of the universe is all over your head. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

44. We've fallen way behind. Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

45. We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball net were still in place, though the nets were gone.

46. When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead.

47. Oh, I read good books, too, but only Earthside. Why that is, I don't really know. Never stopped to analyze it. Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way. When they talk about outer space, they make you feel the silence, so unlike the Earthly kind - and the lifelessness. Whatever the adventures, the message is always the same: humans will never feel at home out there.

48. I think it would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.

49. There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commenses, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour [...] our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection with space becomes as solid as bone.

50. Here in Florida ... we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland - the blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.

51. Development of the space station is as inevitable as the rising of the sun; man has already poked his nose into space and he is not likely to pull it back...

52. It will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

53. Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

54. There is a place with four suns in the sky - red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth - and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.

55. The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.

56. It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.

57. By speaking of space as an Idea, I intend to imply...that the apprehension of objects as existing in space, and of the relations of position, &c., prevailing among them, is not a consequence of experience, but a result of a peculiar constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

58. The idea of nothing has bugged people for centuries, especially in the Western world. We have a saying in Latin, Ex nihilo nihil fit, which means 'out of nothing comes nothing.' It has occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions. It lies at the root of all our common sense, not only in the West, but in many parts of the East as well. It manifests in a kind of terror of nothing, a put-down on nothing, and a put-down on everything associated with nothing, such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine principles. But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful. I would say, on the contrary, you can't have something without nothing. Image nothing but space, going on and on, with nothing in it forever. But there you are imagining it, and you are something in it. The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast.

59. This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper, the room where the black virgin fell down the chimney and burned a hole in the linoleum. Countless are the antelope hooves that have pounded this floor. No wonder the lineleum is worn.

60. I won't give you personnel, I won't give you any money. Do what you like but I won't raise this with the government... And in general I am against moon missions.

61. No creature loves an empty space; Their bodies measure out their place.

62. The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one's entry into a room - the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them.

63. If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.

64. I am not from your world or this one; I was born on the Sun. Sometimes our world becomes overcrowded because our people live so long. Our people are almost free of wars and illness, and sometimes our government officials send colonies to neighboring worlds.

65. [To Wyclef Jean]: You're too close, mon!

66. My mama said to get things done You'd better not mess with Major Tom.

67. They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place.

68. Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.

69. Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?

70. Then there are all those people in the space program. Nas-holes, I call them.

71. Wanna help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone!!!

72. Returning to the moon is an important step for our space program. Establishing an extended human presence on the moon could vastly reduce the costs of further space exploration, making possible ever more ambitious missions. Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is expensive. Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the moon could escape its far lower gravity using far less energy, and thus, far less cost. Also, the moon is home to abundant resources. Its soil contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement.

73. To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither centre nor boundary... Thus the Earth no more than any other world is at the centre.

74. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible - though I know not in what proportion - still remains.

75. Once the press learnt of her success, she was called 'the girl from Mars'.

76. Le temps et l'espace... Ce n'est pas la nature qui nous les impose, c'est nous qui les imposons a la nature parce que nous les trouvons commodes.

77. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Where else but in Texas would men set up to administer space?

78. Then the theory of relativity came and explained the cause of the failure. Electric action requires time to travel from one point of space to another, the simplest instance of this being the finite speed of travel of light... Thus electromagnetic action may be said to travel through space and time jointly. But by filling space and space alone [excluding time] with an ether, the pictorial representations had all supposed a clear-cut distinction between space and time.

79. We saw that radiation cannot suitably be pictured as particles when it is traveling through space. There is a corresponding property for electrons; these should not be pictured as waves so long as they are traveling through empty space.

80. It would let me protect the Earth from asteroids. In fact, for a small fee I would protect the Earth on a monthly basis, locating rocks that could be steered into the Earth and then not doing it if the cheque didn't bounce.

81. Supposing you knew - not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition - that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real - as real to the mind.

82. I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.

83. This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.

84. I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to inexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what this consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and worried and helpless.

85. Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.

86. 'There's a queer performance going on in the other world,' he said. 'It's unbelievable. I never dreamed of such a thing. I - I don't quite know how to put it, and I don't know how to explain it, but - but I am becoming aware that there are other beings - other minds - moving in Space besides mine.'

87. For some people, four walls are three too many.

88. My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me not to measure time by saying, 'It was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.' Before my Soul taught me, I imagined the past as an era not to be met with, and the future as an age that I would never witness. But now I know that in the brief moment of the present, all time exists, including everything that is in time - all that is eagerly anticipated, achieved, or realized. My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me not to define a place by saying 'here' or 'there'. Before my Soul taught me, I thought that when I was in any place on the earth I was remote from every other spot. But now I have learned that the place where I subsist is all places, and the space I occupy is all intervals.

89. A ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light.

90. Omnia qua propter debent per inane quietum aeque ponderibus non aequis concita ferri.

91. There are no remote places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or in space. It's now. (1965)

92. Architecture is surely not the design of space, certainly not the massing or organization of volumes. These are ancillary to the main point, which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists in time.

93. Okay, for the next 20 minutes, that office, is mine.

94. Somebody has been sitting in my chair!

95. Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labor.

96. The mastery of space is man's greatest adventure and his most inspiring undertaking. It should spur us to maximum effort. The nation which mastered all of man's earthly environment- land, sea and air- owes to its destiny the mastery of the limitless environment of space.

97. Ground to Major bye-bye Tom

98. A Grave - is a restricted Breadth - Yet ampler than the Sun - And all the Seas He populates And lands he looks upon To Him who on its small Repose Bestows a single Friend - Circumference without Relief - Or Estimate - or End

99. [as a stoned NASA scientist] Okay, okay check this out. The Mars lander...I did the calculations in feet...but I programmed it in meters! Oops! So instead of landing, fucker buried! 180 million dollar, whoopsie! Two years, SPLAT! Oh, oh, this is great, this is, shh, shh...the Hubble telescope...I forgot to put in the lens! *covers one eye* 'Read the top line for me?' 'Uh, Alpha Centauri, uh...Sirius, the rest is just a black hole!'

100. Oh, 'impressed' is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery. Of course, I rented a television set to watch every moment of their marvelous adventure. That gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight. It was also a moment when a flag means to one more than a flag usually does. I am puzzled and pained by the fact that the English weeklies ignored the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating those precious pebbles, of seeing our marbled globe in the black sky, of feeling along one's spine the shiver and wonder of it. After all, Englishmen should understand that thrill, they who have been the greatest, the purest explorers. Why then drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?