Quotes About Insignificance

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged (...) 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 a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. 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. 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.

On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.

From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.

And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.

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.

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...our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe - are challenged by that point of pale light.

We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy.

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.

My favorite color: A pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam...

70 milyon y?l, bunun ancak milyonda birine eÅŸit bir süre yaÅŸayabilen insan için ne ifade eder? Yaln?zca bir güncük uçan ve günü sonsuzmuÅŸ gibi alg?layan kelebeklere benziyoruz

We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.

And when I concentrate on the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty our aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us.

El universo no fue hecho a medida del hombre; tampoco le es hostil: es indiferente.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.

There was a man and he had eight sons. Apart from that, he was nothing more than a comma on the page of History. It's sad, but that's all you can say about some people.

After all it was only wood. It'd rot in a few hundred years. By the measure of infinity, it hardly existed at all. On average, considered over the lifetime of the multiverse, most things didn't

The bush is not merely a holiday destination; it's where you learn how insignificant you truly

The bush is not merely a holiday destination; it's where you learn how insignificant you truly are.

In this big ball of people, I'm just one grain of sand on this beach.

I'm no one, and I'm nothing.

There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.