Carl Sagan, Cosmos Quotes

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

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

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.

Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.

Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.

For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.

Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.

Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)