Quotes About Perspective

Or maybe arguing with people you disagree with takes less effort than exploring why they think differently from you.

I occasionally wonder if the entire Universe is nothing more than a snow-globe on the living room mantle of a space alien.

From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that!" —EDGAR MITCHELL, APOLLO 14 ASTRONAUT, 1974

however big our world is - in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps - the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

Explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems.

Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune's orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years.

One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject, to know you're wrong.

The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.

First of all, as you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don't. But actually, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren't.

The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.

If everything is so bright, there will be no place for light.

Now imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.

El problema de no advertir la cultura propia es uno de los grandes placeres de viajar al extranjero: descubrir lo que uno no ha visto en el propio país y advertir lo que los demás no conocen acerca de ellos mismos.

No, it's not Pluto. Get over it.

There are people, who walk around every day, asserting that we are alone in this cosmos. They simply have no concept of large numbers, no concept of the size of the cosmos.

It's like asking what is south of the South Pole

The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brain spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

We simply organized the information differently—that's all we did. And the New York Times was making a federal case out of it.

When I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, 'cause they're small and the Universe is big, but I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.

The future is 1/39 as long as the past.

however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.

The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.

Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?

At one time or another every one of us has looked up at the night sky and wondered: What does it all mean? How does it all work? And, what is my place in the universe?