Vastness of Space Quotes

He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.

Billions and billions.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.

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

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 secret of our success on planet Earth is space. Lots of it. Our solar system is a tiny island of activity in an ocean of emptiness.

There really is no such thing as race.

Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!

Astronomy is useful because it raises us above ourselves; it is useful because it is grand; .... It shows us how small is man's body, how great his mind, since his intelligence can embrace the whole of this dazzling immensity, where his body is only an obscure point, and enjoy its silent harmony.

[...] the awesome splendor of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.

Like looking through a telescope into the Milky Way and wondering if we're alone in the universe, it made me realize with the glaring clarity of desert light how scarce and delicate life is, how insignificant we are compared with the forces of nature and the dimensions of space.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

Our bodily eye findeth never an end, but is vanquished by the immensity of space.