Universal Quotes (page 82)
You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species... - with us excitedly chattering, "The Universe is created for us! We're at the center! Everything pays homage to us!" - and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots.
Carl Sagan
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system ofearths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented somemistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are theapexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings inthe various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one atthe same moment!
Henry David Thoreau
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God's love alone is left.
James Baldwin
The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reasons for this omission. For what are we doing, when we establish hard and fast gradations in value between living organisms, but judging them in relation to ourselves, by whether they seem to stand closer to us or farther from us. This is a wholly subjective standard. How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the...
Albert Schweitzer
I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.
H. P. Lovecraft
... Men do not sufficiently realizethat their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort requiredfor fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
Henri Bergson