Selected universe quotes

1. Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

2. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

3. Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

4. The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

5. Man is a universe within himself.

6. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

7. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

8. For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

9. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

10. The Universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The Universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.

11. The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

12. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

13. Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.

14. The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

15. In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.

16. Is the human race a universal constructor?

17. I believe the Universe is planned for good.

18. There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

19. The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

20. My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

21. No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.

22. This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.

23. The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.

24. The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

25. It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

26. Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.

27. I believe we are the only sentient beings in the universe, and I believe that 500 years from now, we will still be the only sentient beings around.

28. The universe has its secrets. Extra dimensions of space might be one of them. If so, the universe has been hiding those dimensions, protecting them, keeping them coyly under wraps. From a casual glance, you would never suspect a thing.

29. Are we alone in an uncaring universe, or is God some kind of wiseguy?

30. Humor is just another defense against the universe.

31. The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

32. You give me the feeling that the universe Was made by something more than human For something less than human. But I identify myself, as always, With something that there's something wrong with, With something human.

33. The gift of life is so precious that we should feel an obligation to pay back the universe for the gift of being alive.

34. We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

35. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.

36. The freedom of the New World is the hope of the Universe.

37. 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?

38. 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.

39. My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

40. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind.

41. I accept the universe.

42. Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs - in time, in space, and in potential - the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

43. My personal theology is described in the Gifford lectures that I gave at Aberdeen in Scotland in 1985, published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.

44. In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight. ~ 74

45. The human race, my intuition tells me, is not outside the cosmic process and is not an accident. It is as much a part of the universe as the trees, the mountains, the aurora, and the stars. ~ Ch. 6

46. I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of spirits. I think it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.

47. We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may only be one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast explosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus unchanged forever. And we are humble. But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into another, Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes. And what is the conclusion? He who follows science blindly, and who follows it alone, comes to a barrier beyond which he cannot see. He who would tell us with the authority of scholarship a complete story of why we exist, of our mission here, has a duty to speak convincingly in a world where men increasingly think for themselves. Exhortation needs to be revised, not to weaken its power, but to increase it, for men who are no longer in the third century. As this occurs, and on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent. But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life.

48. It is manifest... that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence. Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

49. I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . .

50. The perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum. The universe is hostile.

51. Are we assured that there are two things which lead men to believe in the Gods, as we have already stated? What are they? One is the argument about the soul, which has been already mentioned - that it is the eldest and most divine of all things, to which motion attaining generation gives perpetual existence; the other was an argument from the order of the motion of the stars, and of all things under the dominion of the mind which ordered the universe. If a man look upon the world not lightly or ignorantly, there was never any one so godless who did not experience an effect opposite to that which the many imagine. For they think that those who handle these matters by the help of astronomy, and the accompanying arts of demonstration, may become godless, because they see, as far as they can see, things happening by necessity, and not by an intelligent will accomplishing good.

52. The real universe which, by its radiance, calls forth bodies and statues receives from them at the same time a second light that determines the light from the sky.

53. Si hubiera estado presente en la Creacion, habria dado algunas indicaciones utiles.

54. 'Self-blinded are you by your pride: Look up thro' night: the world is wide. 'This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse. 'Think you this mould of hopes and fears Could find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million spheres?' It spake, moreover, in my mind: 'Tho' thou wert scatter'd to the wind, Yet is there plenty of the kind. 'This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse.

55. [The] Third [problem with Darwinism], which I think is overwhelming, and just sort of blows the whole theory of Random Mutation out of the water, is, at least, let me say, raises big questions, that is. Assuming it all did happen by Random Mutation and Natural Selection, where did the laws of gravity come from. Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from? Where did the laws of motion and, of heat come from? Where, I guess that's the same as thermodynamics. Where did all these laws, that make it possible for the universe to function, where did they all come from? Why isn't all just chaos and everything collapsing in on itself and killing everything?

56. All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.

57. As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: 'In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time.' To which adds Guth: 'Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.'

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

59. As God has made the soul immortal, he has made the universe infinite, if it is true that eternity is nothing other than unlimited duration and infinity is space without limits. Suppose the universe were not infinite: God himself would be finite, because he could not be where there is nothing, and he could not increase the size of the universe without adding to his own size and come to be where he had not been before.

60. You imagine that what you can't understand is either spiritual or does not exist. The conclusion is quite wrong; rather there are obviously a million things in the universe that we would need a million quite different organs to understand. For example, I perceive by my senses what makes a magnet point north, what makes tides rise and fall, and what becomes of an animal after death. Your people are not proportioned to perceive such miracles, just as someone blind from birth cannot imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colors of a painting or the shadings of an iris. He will imagine them as something palpable, edible, audible or olfactory. Likewise, if I were to explain to you what I perceive by the senses you do not have, you would interpret it as something that could be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted; but it is not like that.

61. I will prove that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world. Imagine the universe as a great animal, and the stars as worlds like other animals inside it. These stars serve in turn as worlds for other organisms, such as ourselves, horses and elephants. We in our turn are worlds for even smaller organisms such as cankers, lice, worms and mites. And they are earths for other, imperceptible beings. Just as we appear to be a huge world to these little organisms, perhaps our flesh, blood and bodily fluids are nothing more than a connected tissue of little animals that move and cause us to move. Even as they let themselves be led blindly by our will, which serves them as a vehicle, they animate us and combine to produce this action we call life.

62. The size of the universe is no more depressing than the size of a cow.

63. I do not believe He started this world-a going and went away and left it to run by itself.

64. It is manifest that every soul has a certain continuity with the soul of the Universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity. The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the Universe. It is not mixed, yet is there in some presence.

65. The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond.

66. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds!

67. Si toutes les parties de l'univers sont solidaires dans une certaine mesure, un phenomene quelconque ne sera pas l'effet d'une cause unique, mais la resultante de causes infiniment nombreuses; il est, dit-on souvent, la consequence de l'etat de l'univers un instant auparavant.

68. Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.

69. It is as though a star throws the whole secret history of its being into its spectrum, and we have only to learn how to read it aright in order to solve the most abstruse problems of the physical Universe.

70. The tiniest flower is a thought, - a life which corresponds to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant intuition.

71. Eternities before the first-born day, Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame, Calm Night, the everlasting and the same, A brooding mother over chaos lay.

72. Can a little speck in the vast universe truly address the Infinite? The answer is that Prayer is precisely what converts that little speck into an entity of inestimable and cosmic significance.

73. How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.

74. 'Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.

75. 'Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.' (p. 2)

76. Perfection, cosmically, was nothing but perfect Equanimity and Harmony; and in human relations, nothing but perfect Love and Justice. And Perfection began to glow before the eyes of the Western world like a new star, whose light touched with glamour all things as they came forth from Mystery, till to Mystery they were ready to return. This - I thought is surely what the Western world has dimly been rediscovering. There has crept into our minds once more the feeling that the Universe is all of a piece, Equipoise supreme; and all things equally wonderful, and mysterious, and valuable. We have begun, in fact, to have a glimmering of the artist's creed, that nothing may we despise or neglect - that everything is worth the doing well, the making fair - that our God, Perfection, is implicit everywhere, and the revelation of Him the business of our Art.

77. I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And there came to me this thought: What is this Universe - that never had beginning and will never have an end - but a myriad striving to perfect pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that all form one great perfected picture? And what are we - ripples on the tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose - but little works of Art?

78. Everything is flowing- going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature's warm heart.

79. 'The exploration of both the micro and the macro cosmos, is a song to God's glory, which is reflected in everything in the universe.'

80. It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his 'nocturnes' answered: 'All of my life.' With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events.

81. It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them - at least in an infinitesimal way - does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

82. It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlon comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.

83. Cabe ir mas lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido organico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su proposito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologias, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.

84. Ergo vivida vis pervicet et extra processit longe flamentia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.

85. I subdue matter and force it to become my mind's good medium. I rejoice in plants, in animals, in man and in gods, as though they were my children. I feel all the universe nestling about me and following me as though it were my own body.

86. I am NOT nothing! A vaporous phosphorescence on a damp meadow, a miserable worm that crawls and loves, that shouts and talks about wings for an hour or two until his mouth is blocked with earth. The dark powers give no other answer. But within me a deathless Cry, superior to me, continues to shout. For whether I want to or not, I am also, without doubt, a part of the visible and the invisible Universe. We are one.

87. A vehement eros runs through the Universe. It is like the ether: harder than steel, softer than air. It cuts through and passes beyond all things, it flees and escapes.

88. Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them. The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty. Uncertainty and terror. In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing: Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.

89. This ultimate stage of our spiritual exercise is called Silence. Not because its contents are the ultimate inexpressible despair or the ultimate inexpressible joy and hope. Nor because it is the ultimate knowledge which does not condescend to speak, or the ultimate ignorance which cannot. Silence means: Every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, beyond every labor, where he no longer struggles or shouts, where he ripens fully in silence, indestructibly, eternally, with the entire Universe.

90. Die Liebe wirkt magisch. Sie ist der Endzweck der Weltgeschichte, das Amen des Universums.

91. Is there really some balance in the universe? Some scale of justice that will bring her here and find some way to set things to rights?

92. Bleendreeble specialises in the universe. He doesn't branch out much beyond that. But he's quite intereted in this limited field.

93. His spiritual insights were in three major areas: First, he has inspired mankind to see the world anew as the ultimate reality. Second, he perceived and described the physical universe itself as immanently divine. And finally, he challenged us to accept the ultimate demands of modern science which assign humanity no real or ultimate importance in the universe while also aspiring us to lives of spiritual celebration attuned to the awe, beauty and wonder about us.

94. When I gave a lecture in Japan, I was asked not to mention the possible re-collapse of the universe, because it might affect the stock market. However, I can re-assure anyone who is nervous about their investments that it is a bit early to sell: even if the universe does come to an end, it won't be for at least twenty billion years. By that time, maybe the GATT trade agreement will have come into effect.

95. The universe would have expanded in a smooth way from a single point. As it expanded, it would have borrowed energy from the gravitational field, to create matter. As any economist could have predicted, the result of all that borrowing, was inflation. The universe expanded and borrowed at an ever-increasing rate. Fortunately, the debt of gravitational energy will not have to be repaid until the end of the universe.

96. Come out into the universe of Light. Everything in the universe is yours, stretch out your arms and embrace it with love. If you every felt you wanted to do that, you have felt God.

97. What of the Immanent Will and Its designs? It works unconsciously, as heretofore, Eternal artistries in Circumstance.

98. The universe is hostile only when you do not know its laws. To those who know and obey, the universe is friendly.

99. Cobain, can you hear the spheres Singing songs off station to station?

100. That we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that YOU ARE THIS UNIVERSE and you are creating it in every moment...Because you see it starts now, it didn't begin in the past, there was no past. See, if the universe began in the past when that happened it was now, see, but it still now. and the universe is still beginning now, and it's trailing off like the wake of a ship from now, and that wake fades out so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it there... Things are not explained by the past, they are explained by what Happens Now. That Creates the past, and it begins here... That's the birth of responsibility...