At any moment the fully present mind can shatter time and burst into Now.
Astronomy, as nothing else can do, teaches men humility.
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.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God - but to create him.
A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.
Now I understand,” said the last man.
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children. . . it is the reason that one human being's intensely personal tests and triumphs can be harnessed to the good of countless others.
I got skin on the game. I want to serve my country.
Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness. . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.
Evil comes in many forms and seems to reinvent itself time and again. But whatever it calls itself - Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism - they all have one thing in common: the destruction, the end of human liberty.