Werner Herzog Quotes

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

For the Earth is only an atom in the universe of worlds.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy.

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.

John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.

The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.

We're just a weed in the universe

I think the Earth and everything around it is connected - the sky and the planets and the stars and everything else we see as a mystery.

We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.

Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.

You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won't. Especially not astrophysicists - we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth.

Man must rise above the Earth -- to the top of the atmosphere and beyond -- for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives

Beauty is composed of many things and never stands alone. It is part of horizons, blue in the distance, great primeval silences, knowledge of all things of the earth. It embodies the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before, including the spirit world; it is so fragile it can be destroyed by a sound or thought. It may be infinitesimally small or encompass the universe itself. It comes in a swift conception wherever nature has not been disturbed.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

Every star may be a sun to someone.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?

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

The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

Human beings any one of us, and our species as a whole are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.

The cosmic calendar is quite a fertile mode for communicating how small we are over time and space.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

Think of the Earth as a turning point in eternity. Think of the Earth as a meeting point in infinity.