Carl Sagan Quotes

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.

'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.

Humans have existed only for the last 0.001 percent of cosmic time. All of which says that - unless the Homo sapiens brain is the one-and-only instance of cogitating machinery - nearly all the intelligence that's out there is beyond our level. And that intelligence is more than just a little bit beyond.

Part of the point of SETI has always been a search for answers about our own cosmic potential and destiny. If 'they' are out there, it means that there may be hope for us.

I'm trying to figure things out in the world. No one knows what this life thing is all about - there's no manual. Just trying to figure it out.

The main problem is that we, as an Earth civilization, have not come to understand ourselves - see ourselves in a cosmic sense at all.

We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.

When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are in relation to them.

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I have looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

There are many in the field of cosmology, who believe as I do, that finding ways to travel great distances will be essential to keeping human kind alive in an aging universe.

All we can say is that with hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible. If we are sufficiently self-centered and choose to deny that any of these support life, no one can prove we are wrong. But I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.

Logotherapy sees the human patient in all his humanness. I step up to the core of the patient's being. And that is a being in search of meaning, a being that is transcending himself, a being capable of acting in love for others.

If there is life out there that's so much more advanced than we are, and they know either how to travel great distances in short amounts of time, or they're able to come from a parallel universe into ours, why don't they just come and show themselves?

I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.

Up to this day, there has been no proof of the existence of any intelligence other than the human.

I think 'Speech & Debate' surprised people because it's a play about teenagers that took the teenagers very seriously. They are very real. People wanted to see if they identified with one of the kids, that loneliness, that yearning for something bigger. That feeling of being stuck, it's very adolescent, but those kinds of feelings linger on.

I believe movies are showing us what we already know with aliens especially, so when we do get to meet them it's not a big shock.

Why should we consider defining intelligence as something global and as something that hasn't actually yet appeared on Earth? It may be useful for envisioning the future of our own civilization and any others that may be out there among the stars. It might give us something to strive for.

We are all born alone and die alone. The loneliness is definitely part of the journey of life.

When I'm by myself asking the questions that many of us do at some point in our lives, I look to the stars knowing that the answers are somewhere out there waiting to be discovered.

I spent my late twenties and all of my thirties figuring out what I was supposed to be doing and where my home was.

It's really hard to do this life - to be a human being alone.

The further and further we look out with our telescopes and the further and further we look in with our microscopes, the larger and larger and smaller and smaller the universe becomes in order to escape the investigation because we are the universe looking at itself.