Space

Space is the relatively empty space between celestial bodies such as stars, planets and moons.

Quotes

Space is to place as eternity is to time. - Joseph Joubert

• Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
  • Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• Space is as infinite as we can imagine, and expanding this perspective is what adjusts humankind’s focus on conquering our true enemies, the formidable foes: ignorance and limitation.
  • Vanna Bonta, The Impact of Space Activities Upon Society (ESA Br) European Space Agency (2005)

• The impact of space activities is nothing less than the galvanizing of hope and imagination for human life continuum into a future of infinite possibility.
  • Vanna Bonta, The Impact of Space Activities Upon Society (ESA Br) European Space Agency (2005)

• Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it — for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?
  • Arthur C. Clarke, We'll Never Conquer Space (1960)

• We cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets and set up new laboratories in space. They are as much beyond our vision today as fire or electricity would be beyond the imagination of a fish.
  • Arthur C. Clarke, Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

• Space. It seems to go on and on forever. Then you get to the end, and a monkey starts throwing barrels at you.
  • Phillip Fry, Futurama

• Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
  • Frank Herbert, Dune (1965) ^{[specific citation needed]}

• Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.
  • Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation ^{[specific citation needed]}

• Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.
  • Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Ch. 1 (1924)

• No creature loves an empty space;
  Their bodies measure out their place.
  • Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax

• When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
  • John Muir, Travels in Alaska (1915)

• Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth (with the single exception of the catastrophic destruction of space itself). Will this happen before our technical civilisation disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it for ever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.
  • Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (2003) ^{[specific citation needed]}

• Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.
  • Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) ^{[specific citation needed]}

• I have sat by night beside a cold lake
  And touched things smoother than moonlight on still water,
  But the moon on this cloud sea is not human,
  And here is no shore, no intimacy,
  Only the start of space, the road to suns.
  • F. R. Scott, Trans Canada

• Without space, there is no time.
  • Dejan Stojanovic in “A Star Deep in the Mind”

• Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space.
  • Dejan Stojanovic in “Inner Space”

• Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series, spoken by Capt. James T. Kirk in the opening credits, attributed to Gene Roddenberry

See also

• Astronomy
• Stars

External links

• Space Quotes to Ponder Over 100 brief quotations explaining why expansion of civilization into space is essential to the future survival and evolution of humankind.
• Eyes Turned Skyward Quotations from astronauts, astronomers and many others about space.