For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still.
If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple as well.
We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.
Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.
I think everybody in the world should agree to no care about anything. But we'll all have to do it at the same time.
In reality there is no cause or effect, there is only the indifference of the universe.
Who is he that shall control me? Why may not I act and speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the unvierse, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them?
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.
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.
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt.
Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
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.
The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.
In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
