The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
CARL SAGANWriting is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.
More Carl Sagan Quotes
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Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
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For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
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You have to know the past to understand the present.
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If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
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Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
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Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes.
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Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.
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Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
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Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.
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The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
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You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.
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We are all stardust.
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A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles.
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The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.
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Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.
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Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
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If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
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Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
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We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.
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I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
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The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
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If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.
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People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons.
CARL SAGAN