By looking far out into space we are also looking far back i... - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

"The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small."

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

"One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time."

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."