Quote

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

Carl Sagan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Carl Sagan
Age: 62 †
Born: 1934
Born: November 9
Died: 1996
Died: December 20
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Physicist
Planetary Scientist
Science Communicator
Brooklyn
New York
Carl Edward Sagan
Sagan
Carl E. Sagan
Carl E Sagan
C. E. Sagan
C.E. Sagan
C E Sagan
C. Sagan
C Sagan
Sagan C
Sagan C.
Sagan C. E.
Sagan CE
Week
Libraries
Greatest
Trick
Books
Finish
Read
Tricks
Book
Library
Time
Lifetime
Percent
Tenth
Thousand
Contents

More quotes by Carl Sagan

Image
Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan
Image
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
Image
There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
Carl Sagan
Image
A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.
Carl Sagan
Image
For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan
Image
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
Carl Sagan
Image
We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.
Carl Sagan
Image
We can always take but never give.
Carl Sagan
Image
Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.
Carl Sagan
Image
Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome.
Carl Sagan
Image
UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.
Carl Sagan
Image
It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not.
Carl Sagan
Image
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.
Carl Sagan
Image
The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood
Carl Sagan
Image
Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.
Carl Sagan
Image
The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
Carl Sagan
Image
Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.
Carl Sagan
Image
Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone.
Carl Sagan
Image
When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.
Carl Sagan
Image
It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Carl Sagan