My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
—J. B. S. Haldane
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
—Bertrand Russell
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
—Maxine Hong Kingston
We cannot imprison the mind in the brain. The mind is in every cell of our body and also extends into the whole universe.
—Deepak Chopra
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
—Steven Weinberg
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 in Cosmos
The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.
—Tom Robbins in Jitterbug Perfume
For monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a raccoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.
—Terence McKenna
The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
—Andre Malraux
We’re making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.
—Tom Robbins
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
—Max Frisch
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
—Jacques Lacan
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
—Steven Weinberg
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
—Edward P. Tryon