Carl Sagan Quotes

'Who are we?' And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.

Life is like an analogy.

When you think of it, really there are four fundamental questions of life. You've asked them, I've asked them, every thinking person asks them. They boil down to this; origin, meaning, morality and destiny. 'How did I come into being? What brings life meaning? How do I know right from wrong? Where am I headed after I die?'

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

We are here to help others; what the others are here for, I have no idea.

Spaceflight gives us a chance to reflect on the context of our existence. We are reminded that we are human before any of our differences, before all of the lines are drawn that divide us.

The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.

Just because something might not have a deep philosophical meaning doesn't mean it's not important or relevant.

We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

We are all students of the world; frail embodied consciousnesses struggling to understand, and be a meaningful part of this great, mysterious gift of life.

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Every child who is born is the universe looking at itself with fresh eyes.

We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.

What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human"?

Hopefully, great science fiction films help you think about issues that relate to yourself, whether it's: What's my purpose? Why am I here? What is it that makes me who I am? Those are the kind of questions my favorite science fiction films ask.

When we can build something like the Hubble telescope and fathom images of this vast cosmos of which we are a part, it really gives pause to wonder what and who we are within a larger framework than linear adventures at the shopping mall and taxes.

What a piece of work is a man

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.

How you approach the problem of suffering depends on how you approach life itself. There are only two ways. Either meaning is surrounded by matter, or matter is surrounded by meaning.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.

I'm a teleological, existential agnostic.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

To be is to be perceived