Carl Sagan Quotes

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.

...but that was the thing about reality. It didn't need to make sense.

I like normal stuff people fear - like spiders and heights. I'm frightened by the unknown, by things that are hard to figure out and get a grip on.

It's fascinating how life works.

When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know.

The older I get, the more I'm surprised with life. Things don't end up the way you think they will.

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

In showbiz one minute you're up there making thousands of people laugh, next minute you're picking up toffees, you know it's real life.

Everybody has a good idea, but nothing goes as planned.

At any given moment, we each face a barrage of obligations, often disparate and distinct from what we thought would happen when we woke up. From the tragic to the common to the extraordinary, life refuses to be divvied up into careful slices of time. No technology can manage to overcome the realities of reality.

We just do not know what is normal.

Anything can happen, and you have to be able to understand the reality of the world that we live in.

Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.

Life is never what it seems - and that’s the great thing about it

There are always loose ends in real life.

Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.

Things are always different from what they might be.

The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.