"We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose."
"By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang."
"Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."
"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."
"And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude."
"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."