Ernest Cline Quotes

I'm too small for the universe to revolve around me. It is a huge relief!

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.

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

How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?

On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all. -Brian Fitzgerald

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

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Look up at the stars, not down at your feet.

You'd chosen to be an upright biped on the surface of a small planet of a minor sun on the edge of a minor galaxy of one of the multiple trillions of universes. That's OK. It doesn't matter what form you take.

It's tiny out there...it's inconsequential. It's ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.

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?

I try to keep this in mind when tied in to a rope 75 feet up in a tree... The history of ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of let-downs for those who like to believe we are special.

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.

The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars.

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

Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.

I like to think that we’re revolving on this planet and revolving through the galaxy. I love having context that’s so much bigger than I can fathom. It’s fantastic to realise how insignificant you are.

When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests.

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

No matter what you think-life goes on and the world still turns and the universe has its own story. The most we can do is plan anyway, but understand, be humbled by things greater than ourselves.

If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.

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

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.