104 Universe-Inspired Quotes

The universe has long been a source of mystery and inspiration, captivating our minds and souls with its vastness and beauty. From ancient philosophers to modern astrophysicists, thinkers throughout history have tried to unravel its secrets and express its grandeur through words. In this carefully curated collection, we've gathered 104 of the most profound and thought-provoking quotes inspired by the cosmos. Whether you are seeking motivation, a sense of wonder, or a deeper connection to the world beyond our planet, these quotes will ignite your imagination and bring you closer to the infinite expanse that surrounds us. Join us on a journey through the stars, and let these words elevate your spirit and expand your horizons.

1. “The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.” - Robert A. Heinlein

2. “All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.” - Douglas Adams

3. “You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” - Alan Watts

4. “Nothing happens until something moves.” - Albert Einstein

5. “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” - J.B.S. Haldane

6. “Why should things be easy to understand?” - Thomas Pynchon

7. “Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns it calls me on and on across the universe.” - John Lennon

8. “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” - C.S. Lewis

9. “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke

10. “If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.” - Philip K. Dick

11. “Whether or not it is clear to you,no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” - Max Ehrmann

12. “He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced.” - Douglas Adams

13. “The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.” - John Muir

14. “There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me” - Gustave Flaubert

15. “You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.” - Alan Watts

16. “With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.” - Orson Scott Card

17. “There is no pattern the human mind can devise that does not exist already within the bounds of nature...Everything we do, see, write, notate, all are an echo of the deep seams of the universe. Music is the invisible world made visible through sound.” - Kate Mosse

18. “The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. (from "Rediscovering Lost Values")” - Martin Luther King Jr.

19. “They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me.” - Jack Kerouac

20. “Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?” - Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

21. “The universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” - Steve Maraboli

22. “Or sit they girt by laws unknownWhereto the senses serve as bars –With fire of unrecorded starsThat light a heaven not our own?(“The Testimony of the Suns”)” - George Sterling

23. “The compass rose is nothing but a star with an infinite number of rays pointing in all directions.It is the one true and perfect symbol of the universe.And it is the one most accurate symbol of you.Spread your arms in an embrace, throw your head back, and prepare to receive and send coordinates of being. For, at last you know—you are the navigator, the captain, and the ship.” - Vera Nazarian

24. “Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.” - David Mitchell

25. “It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

26. “But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgments! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress...” - Friedrich Nietzsche

27. “I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.” - Arthur C. Clarke

28. “The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.” - Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

29. “In reality the universe has no geometry.” - Kedar Joshi

30. “The universe is a philosophical abyss.” - Kedar Joshi

31. “We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.” - Pierre Simon de Laplace

32. “The Universe is very, very big.It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever.Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies. Rule number two: Everything lasts forever.” - Craig Ferguson

33. “Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

34. “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

35. “Just as heart is a fountain of unspoken words,the universe is a womb of wonder weird worlds.” - Toba Beta

36. “Don't give up! It's not over. The universe is balanced. Every set-back bears with it the seeds of a come-back.” - Steve Maraboli

37. “There are no walls at the edge of this universe...absence of gravity is the limit of space existence.” - Toba Beta

38. “Nothing can be inside an edgeless universe.” - Toba Beta

39. “A solid idea is a firm foundation of a universe construction.” - Toba Beta

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

41. “Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male.” - Edward Dahlberg

42. “Walk in the rain,smell flowers,stop along the way,build sandcastles,go on field trips,find out how things work,tell stories,say the magic words,trust the universe.” - Bruce Williamson

43. “On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest—hence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.However, some of the lamps are “turned down” and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will)—hence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to “feel” a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe—and this includes its sense of connection to other beings, its sense of dual presence in the material world and the metaphysical world, and the thin connection line to the wick of fuel or the flow of electricity that resides beyond the material plane and is the universal energy.To remain “lit” each lantern lamp must tap into the universal Source of energy.If the link is weak, depression and-or illness sets in.If the link is strong, life persists.This metaphor to me best illustrates the universe.” - Vera Nazarian

44. “No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.” - Anne Rice

45. “Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.” - Deepak Chopra

46. “Visible objects therefore do not perish utterly, since nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.” - Lucretius

47. “The supply of matter in the universe was never more tightly packed than it is now, or more widely spread out. For nothing is ever added to it or subtracted from it. It follows that the movement of atoms today is no different from what it was in bygone ages and always will be. So the things that have regularly come into being will continue to come into being in the same manner; they will be and grow and flourish so far as each is allowed by the laws of nature.” - Lucretius

48. “We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.” - Brian Cox

49. “Parents. Honestly. Sometimes they really do think the world revolves around them.” - Randa Abdel-Fattah

50. “The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms.” - Lao Tzu

51. “The universe is infinite, so there is room for everyone, for every belief, for every custom, and for every desire. You are in competition with no one but yourself.” - Stephen Richards

52. “Blackhole doesn't crush those things in the vicinity.It miniaturises everything in different laws of physics.” - Toba Beta

53. “Though we might like to think so, humankind is not at any special, unique or privileged location in the gargantuan, perhaps infinite, Universe.” - Eric Chaisson

54. “Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.” - Johannes Kepler

55. “We are always trying to convert people to a belief in our own explanation of the universe. We think that the more people there are who believe as we do, the more certain it will be that what we believe is the truth. But it doesn't work that way at all.” - Paulo Coelho

56. “In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, “I see you’re an astrophysicist. What’s that?” I answer, “Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe—the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing.” Then he asks, “What do you teach at Princeton?” and I say, “I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony.” Five minutes later, I’m on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we’d like to ask the court, and I say, “Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The ‘thousand’ cancels with the ‘milli-’ and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime.” Again I’m out on the street.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

57. “A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.” - Norman Maclean

58. “On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.” - Charles A. Lindbergh

59. “At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.” - Deepak Chopra

60. “Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.” - Stephen King

61. “In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.” - Lawrence M. Krauss

62. “If the universe does consist of a battle between the devil and God, the final analysis should conclude that religion would have been the devil’s most brilliant move and science, God’s.” - Steve Maraboli

63. “Light, Life and Love are like three glow-worms at thy feet: the whole universe of stars, the dewdrops on the grass whereon thou walkest!” - Aleister Crowley

64. “You cannot hinder someone’s free will, that’s the first law of the Universe, no matter what the decision.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

65. “When a human awakens to a great dream and throws the full force of his soul over it, all the universe conspires in your favor.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

66. “Love is the most mysterious force in the universe.It locks two souls together across space and time.Once that spark is ignited it consumes all else.It was that shard of light that transformed a dark soul forever.Now let that love burn bright like a sun for eternity…” - Kion Ahadi

67. “We are focus-points of consciousness, [...] enormously creative. When we enter the self-constructed hologrammetric arena we call spacetime, we begin at once to generate creativity particles, imajons, in violent continuous pyrotechnic deluge. Imajons have no charge of their own but are strongly polarized through our attitudes and by the force of our choice and desire into clouds of conceptons, a family of very-high-energy particles which may be positive, negative or neutral. [...] Some common positive conceptions are exhilarons, excytons, rhapsodons, jovions. Common negative conceptions include gloomons, tormentons, tribulons, agonons, miserons."Indefinite numbers of conceptions are created in nonstop eruption, a thundering cascade of creativity pouring from every center of personal consciousness. They mushroom into conception clouds, which can be neutral or strongly charged - buoyant, weightless or leaden, depending on the nature of their dominant particles."Every nanosecond an indefinite number of conception clouds build to critical mass, then transform in quantum bursts to high-energy probability waves radiating at tachyon speeds through an eternal reservoir of supersaturated alternate events. Depending on their charge and nature, the probability waves crystallize certain of these potential events to match the mental polarity of their creating consciousness into holographic appearance. [...]"The materialized events become that mind's experience, freighted with all the aspects of physical structure necessary to make them real and learningful to the creating consciousness. This autonomic process is the fountain from which springs every object and event in the theater of spacetime."The persuasion of the imajon hypothesis lies in its capacity for personal verification. The hypothesis predicts that as we focus our conscious intention on the positive and life-affirming, as we fasten our thought on these values, we polarize masses of positive conceptions, realize beneficial probability-waves, bring useful alternate events to us that otherwise would not have appeared to exist."The reverse is true in the production of negative events, as is the mediocre in-between. Through default or intention, unaware or by design, we not only choose but create the visible outer conditions that are most resonant to our inner state of being [...]” - Richard Bach

68. “Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.” - Criss Jami

69. “Just one smileImmensely increases the beauty Of the universe.” - Sri Chinmoy

70. “May peace rule the universe; may peace rule in kingdoms and empires; may peace rule in states and in the lands of the potentates; may peace rule in the house of friends and may peace also rule in the house of enemies.” - Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

71. “But they were not friends. They were here to keep each other from spinning off alone into the dark matter of the universe.” - Carol Anshaw

72. “Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.” - Clifford D. Simak

73. “We are not supposed to all be the same, feel the same, think the same, and believe the same. The key to continued expansion of our Universe lies in diversity, not in conformity and coercion. Conventionality is the death of creation.” - Anthon St. Maarten

74. “The unfolding of a Spermatic Aura like a sheet in the Universe. That we are ~” - Grigoris Deoudis

75. “See the world anew and write down the bones of it.” - A. D. Sams

76. “Yeah, I said the universe. Call it Fate or The Force or whatever you want. Everything is everything. It's all part of one big system. I like to think of it as the universe.” - Angie Smibert

77. “Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.” - Anatole France

78. “That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.” - Hermann Hesse

79. “The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats.” - Wil McCarthy

80. “Pride is yet again in the way of our mind’s ability to accept that we may not be the most intelligent and advanced people in the universe or on Earth since it was formed along with the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.” - Mario Stinger

81. “After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.” - Douglas Adams

82. “Don’t close your eyes to the Universe and then complain: ‘It’s dark.” - Paulo Coelho

83. “The Universe is the creation of the mind. Universe exists inside the mind as the flower exists inside the seed.” - Amit Ray

84. “The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.” - Richard Dawkins

85. “One small boy was all it took to upset the universe” - James Miller

86. “Number rules the universe.” - Pythagoras

87. “The more grateful we are, the more we practice this in our everyday lives, the more connected we become to the universe around us.” - Stephen Richards

88. “Did anyone else have these moments of amazement over the existence of humanity, when they are in awe of how they are here, and alive, even if it's only for a short while?” - Michelle Madow

89. “He intentado, no se con que fortuna, la redacción de cuentos directos. No me atrevo a afirmar que son sencillos; no hay en la tierra, una sola página, una sola palabra, que lo sea, ya que todas postulan el universo, cuyo más notorio atributo es la complejidad.” - Jorge Luis Borges

90. “Ogni linguaggio è un alfabeto di simboli il cui uso presuppone un passato che gli interlocutori condividono; come trasmettere agli altri l'infinito Aleph, che la mia timorosa memoria a stento abbraccia?” - Jorge Luis Borges

91. “It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.” - Saki

92. “As we know life in ourselves we want to understand life in the universe in order to enter into harmony with it.” - Albert Schweitzer

93. “A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.” - Lawrence M. Krauss

94. “Quite possibly, the purpose of the universe is to provide a congenial home for self-conscious creatures who can ask profound questions and who can probe the nature of the universe itself.” - Owen Gingerich

95. “Standing there, peering around his room, Pete realized something that should have dawned on him years ago: Science really did suck. (Russell was right.) There just wasn’t any point to it. Sure, in its most altruistic distillation, science saved lives—but when had it ever made those lives worth living? The cold machine called science’s sole purpose, and Pete knew it now, was to drain the wonder out of things, to sap the imagination of its juices, to rob possibilities from dreamers. Science explained without ever getting to the crux of the matter, locking us all into a single paradigm of thought: that all we are is randomly accumulated stardust hanging out on a larger clump of randomly accumulated stardust that is spiraling out and away from other chunks of randomly accumulated stardust, on a collision course with an empty infinity.” - Jay Nichols

96. “The destruction of this universe would have no significance on a cosmic scale.” - Stanley Kubrick

97. “I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

98. “Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again. But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life. It was almost as if a secret had passed between them. Was this some kind of love? I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness. I wanted to whisper to them: 'This is it. This is it'".” - Alan Lightman

99. “Every day you play with the light of the universe.” - Pablo Neruda

100. “This magical universe is so faithful in waiting for us to get out of our own way. No matter how long you have gone astray, when you take action, the universe moves to support the act. Move in the direction of your goals and watch the magic flow.” - Steve Maraboli

101. “She who saves a single soul, saves the universe.” - American McGee

102. “Universe is a friend, it creates us; universe is an enemy, it kills us! It is neither a complete-friend, nor a complete-enemy.” - Mehmet Murat ildan

103. “I think we’re part of a greater wisdom that we will ever understand; a higher order, call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is.” - George Carlin

104. “I don't feel so sad when somebody dies, Julio, because they fly away to explore the stars and planets. When it's our turn we join them in exploring the universe.” - Gilbert Hernández