100 Carl Sagan Quotes To Awaken The Scientist In You

Here is a collection of the 100 most insightful Carl Sagan quotes everyone should read. Let’s awaken your inner scientist!

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Top 10 Carl Sagan Quotes

1. “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” ― Carl Sagan

2. “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” ― Carl Sagan

3. “If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power.” — Carl Sagan

4. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” ― Carl Sagan

5. “I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it.” — Carl Sagan

6. “If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.” ― Carl Sagan

7. “Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.” ― Carl Sagan

8. “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” ― Carl Sagan

9. “Every star may be a sun to someone.” ― Carl Sagan

10. “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” ― Carl Sagan

Most Iconic Carl Sagan Quotes

1. “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” ― Carl Sagan

2. “I don’t want to believe. I want to know.” ― Carl Sagan

3. “You have to know the past to understand the present.” ― Carl Sagan

4. “Who is in a position to set limits on what we will know? ‘Unknowable’ is a deep failure of the imagination.” — Carl Sagan

5. “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” ― Carl Sagan

6. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” ― Carl Sagan

7. “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” ― Carl Sagan

8. “It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” ― Carl Sagan

9. “It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.” ― Carl Sagan

10. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” ― Carl Sagan

11. “When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.” ― Carl Sagan

12. “In all of the four-billion-year history of the human family, there is only one generation priveleged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours.” ― Carl Sagan

13. “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” ― Carl Sagan

14. “I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.” ― Carl Sagan

15. “It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.” ― Carl Sagan

16. “The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” ― Carl Sagan

17. “Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.” — Carl Sagan

18. “If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.” ― Carl Sagan

19. “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan

20. “National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space.” — Carl Sagan

21. “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” ― Carl Sagan

22. “It’s a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in the Constitution and the Bill or Rights, the people had to be educated and they have to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don’t run the government, the government runs us.” — Carl Sagan

23. “Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse” ― Carl Sagan

24. “Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.” ― Carl Sagan

25. “We simply have to keep an open mind – all of us.” — Carl Sagan

26. “Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.” ― Carl Sagan

27. “We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, ‘I am the great silent spaces between worlds.’” — Carl Sagan

28. “For thousands of years humans were oppressed – as some of us still are – by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.” — Carl Sagan

29. “If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor.” — Carl Sagan

30. “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” ― Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Quotes On The Magnificence Of Cosmos

1. “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” ― Carl Sagan

2. “The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty.” — Carl Sagan

3. “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” ― Carl Sagan

4. “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.” ― Carl Sagan

5. “I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.” ― Carl Sagan

6. “It never happens that a new constellation suddenly rises out of the east. There is an order, a predictability, a permanence about the stars. In a way, they are almost comforting.” ― Carl Sagan

7. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” — Carl Sagan

8. “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.” ― Carl Sagan

9. “A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” ― Carl Sagan

10. “We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.” ― Carl Sagan

11. “Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” ― Carl Sagan

12. “Most of us would be surprised to hear that the universe is going to end one day. We expect the universe to go on forever into the future. why do we have the idea that it doesn’t go on forever into the past?” — Carl Sagan

13. “By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.” ― Carl Sagan

14. “Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.” — Carl Sagan

15. “You mustn’t think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn’t been that for billions of years. Think of it more as… ..cultivated.” ― Carl Sagan

16. “The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.” ― Carl Sagan

17. “There is much that science doesn’t understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises” ― Carl Sagan

18. “So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.” ― Carl Sagan

19. “Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.” ― Carl Sagan

20. “The study of the galaxies reveals a universal order and beauty. It also shows us chaotic violence on a scale hitherto undreamed of.” — Carl Sagan

21. “I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the Earth …” — Carl Sagan

22. “But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.” ― Carl Sagan

23. “In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.” — Carl Sagan

24. “The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet.” — Carl Sagan

25. “In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty.” ― Carl Sagan

26. “We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning.” ― Carl Sagan

27. “The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever.” — Carl Sagan

28. “Some modern deep sky photographs show more galaxies beyond the Milky Way than stars within the Milky Way. Every one of them is an island universe containing perhaps a hundred billion suns. Such an image is a profound sermon on humility.” — Carl Sagan

29. “Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.” ― Carl Sagan

30. “The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.” ― Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Quotes To Enrich You

1. “In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” ― Carl Sagan

2. “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan

3. “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” ― Carl Sagan

4. “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” ― Carl Sagan

5. “Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have.” — Carl Sagan

6. “Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” ― Carl Sagan

7. “We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.” ― Carl Sagan

8. “If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” ― Carl Sagan

9. “When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” — Carl Sagan

10. “Literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. But there are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.” ― Carl Sagan

11. “You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” ― Carl Sagan

12. “We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster” ― Carl Sagan

13. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.” — Carl Sagan

14. “The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.” — Carl Sagan

15. “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.” ― Carl Sagan

16. “I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.” ― Carl Sagan

17. “Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.” ― Carl Sagan

18. “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.” ― Carl Sagan

19. “Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.” ― Carl Sagan

20. “But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.” ― Carl Sagan

21. “You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.” ― Carl Sagan

22. “I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” ― Carl Sagan

23. “Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.” ― Carl Sagan

24. “Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists – although heavy on the wonder side and light on scepticism.” — Carl Sagan

25. “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” ― Carl Sagan

26. “Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” — Carl Sagan

27. “An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.” ― Carl Sagan

28. “If you’re too resolutely and uncompromisingly sceptical, you’re going to miss (or resent) the transforming discoveries in science, and either way you will be obstructing understanding and progress. Mere scepticism is not enough.” — Carl Sagan

29. “Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity.” — Carl Sagan

30. “For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.” ― Carl Sagan

The End

I hope these Carl Sagan quotes have inspired you to get more curious about the world around and inside us. Mysteries are waiting to be discovered!