Martin Rees Quotes

It's impossible that we're alone in the universe. Every time we think we're more special than others, we're proven wrong.

We explore astronomical life through medicate experience, and we live life through love and ardvarks.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

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

I have a vast curiosity about our universe, our origins, and its probable future.

Every star may be a sun to someone.

The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence.

It makes good sense to revere the sun and the stars ... because we are their children

Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun. It is this backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source. It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us.

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

Wizard's Seventh Rule Life is the future, not the past.

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

Even the sun directs our gaze away from itself and to the life illumined by it.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

Whether we wake or we sleep, Whether we carol or weep, The Sun with his Planets in chime, Marketh the going of Time.

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Think of the Earth as a turning point in eternity. Think of the Earth as a meeting point in infinity.

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.

Think about all the tomorrows of your life.

While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it's worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system, but the solar system is not in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is not in the center of the universe, and it may come to pass that our universe is just one of many that comprise a multiverse. And in case you're one of those people who thinks that the edge may be a special place, we are not at the edge of anything either.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.