Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

I'm too small for the universe to revolve around me. It is a huge relief!

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all. -Brian Fitzgerald

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

It is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not imagine that the whole universe exists only for him.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.

I still feel there is a case to be made for my old belief that as man approaches the 'new heaven and the new earth' -- or the space-age universe, if you will, he must do so with humility rather than with arrogance.

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

Look up at the stars and you're gone.

The world is full of more interesting things than my voice.

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.

Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are.

Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe.

When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.

How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?

I am an astronomer, and my job is to look to the heavens to better understand the universe and our place in it.

At the age of eight, I bought my first telescope and would spend hours gazing at the moon and stars. I remember thinking what it must have been like when man first realized that we were only a very small part of the overall picture.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

Man must rise above the Earth -- to the top of the atmosphere and beyond -- for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives