Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

We're just a weed in the universe

Man - life in general - seems irrelevant to the workings of the universe: a mere smudge of water, grease, and carbon on a pinpoint planet circling a star of no special consequence.

I'll go out at night and look up at the stars and think, 'How ridiculously inconsequential I am in the scheme of things.'

I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more and more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged and hoofed flocks and herds that darken the air and populate the plains and forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Feeling a little small? Well, in the context of the cosmos, we are small.

In fact, there's an entire universe out there that's pretty much indifferent to struggles that big, no matter how serious they've been in your life.

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.

We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news.

Kid says to me, "You play baseball? What position? Left out?" and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is only one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put it that way, the comment loses it's importance.

When people really understand the Big Bang and the whole sweep of the evolution of the universe, it will be clear that humans are fairly insignificant.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

One lesson astronomy tells us is that we're a tiny mote in a hostile void, and help is too far away.

The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We're tiny. We don't matter. We're here for a second and then gone the next. We're a sneeze in the life of the universe.

Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.

Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are. They're supposed to be gigantic explosions and they're just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough you realize how important and powerful you are.

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.