Eugene Cernan Quotes

Nobody can take those footsteps I made on the surface of the moon away from me.

What fiction could match - in drama or suspense - man's first walk on the Moon?

Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.

I expected the unexpected and went [on the Moon] with an open mind. I think the visual scene was described by my words on first landing - "magnificent desolation." Magnificent for the achievement of being there, and desolate for the eons of lifelessness.

As I step off at the surface at Taurus-Littrow, I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible.

As the first human to land on any world outside the Earth, and probably the first living creature of any sort to come from the Earth and reach the Moon, his legacy will be safe as long as intelligent life survives in this corner of the cosmos.

What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.

Fame doesn't matter. Money doesn't matter. Those things are forever fleeting. I just want to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so that when I'm long gone my great-great-grandchildren can walk up to it and say, "That's my ancestor." That will be my legacy.

I participated with great honor in becoming one of the first to land on the moon, and now I am devoting and have devoted many years of my life to enabling Americans to lead international nations to permanence on the planet Mars.

Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't

...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.

What happens to you here is forever.

Sooner or later the public will forget you; the memory of you will fade. What's important are the individuals you've influenced along the way.

Six out of seven times we landed successfully [on the Moon]. I wanted to be a part of that and I was a part of that, so my personal feeling is of great gratefulness for having somehow been in a position to have been given the opportunity to be on that first landing. That's a marvelous experience for a little kid that grew up in New Jersey. So I'm very thankful, and I asked the whole world to give thanks once we successfully landed.

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from Terra-these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

It must be a good thing to die conscious of having performed some real good, and to know that by this work one will live, at least in the memory of some, and will have left a good example to those that come after. A work that is good-it may not be eternal, but the thought expressed in it is, and the work itself will certainly remain in existence for a long, long time; and if afterwards others arise, they can do no better than follow in the footsteps of such predecessors and do their work in the same way.

'What was being on the moon literally like?' [. . .] 'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. 'It was just like being here.'

Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.

Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured.

As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

The exciting part for me, as a pilot, was the landing on the moon. That was the time that we had achieved the national goal of putting Americans on the moon. The landing approach was, by far, the most difficult and challenging part of the flight. Walking on the lunar surface was very interesting, but it was something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable. So the feeling of elation accompanied the landing rather than the walking.

I think whatever I've done, I hope I've earned a footnote in India's long and tortuous history.

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.