1,131 Quotes by Carl Sagan

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species ...

This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths / of exquisite interrelationships / of the awesome machinery of nature

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars.... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes.