Echoes

We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't.

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

For those who are awake, there is one common world; but of those who sleep, each turns aside into a private world of his own.

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

After the dazzle of day is gone, only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; after the plain of the surface and the breakers have gone, the depths of the ocean show beautiful forms.

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.

Consider again 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. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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. 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. 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.

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

The sun and distant stars appeared to mingle in the perfection of the same natural order, and I felt, in the stillness of the tropical night, how much more alive and near to the heavens was this part of the earth.

When despair for the world grows in me I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world.

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

We all have enough strength to bear the misfortunes of others.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

'What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well.'

There are tears in things, and mortal things touch the mind.