Quotes About Exploration

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject 

Toda nuestra ciencia, comparada con la realidad, es primitiva e infantil… y sin embargo es lo más preciado que tenemos. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)

Our individual growth represents the advancement of the species. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.

Mašta ?e nas ?esto odvoditi do svjetova kojih nikada nije bilo. Ali bez nje nikamo ne bismo stigli. Sumnja nam omogu?uje da razlu?imo maštu od ?injenica, da provjerimo naša razmišljanja.

This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities.

There's a certain discipline involved. We can't just go off shouting 'little green men' every time we detect something we don't at first understand, because we're going to look mighty silly when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It's permitted to not be sure.

It is on this world that we developed our passion for exploring the Cosmos, and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny.

the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

Voyages to the outer solar system are controlled from a single place on the planet Earth, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, California.

Nuestro planeta y nuestro sistema solar se hallan rodeados por un nuevo mundo oceánico, las profundidades del espacio. Y no es más infranqueable que el de otras épocas. Quizá todavía es pronto. Puede que no haya llegado el momento. Pero esos otros mundos, que prometen indecibles oportunidades, nos hacen señas.

I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live?

They will manage to cross the ocean of becoming.

No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred.

Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind's—on the human condition.…

Our species has discovered a way to communicate through the dark, to transcend immense distances. No means of communication is faster or cheaper or reaches out farther. It's called radio.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it

what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting

In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up.

We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. —T. H. Huxley

I Ã¢â'¬Â¦ had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before," wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, "but as far as it was possible for man to go." Two centuries later, Yuri Romanenko, on returning to Earth after what was then the longest space flight in history, said "The Cosmos is a magnet Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Once you've been there, all you can think of is how to get back.