Quote

A stars rich in europium of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.

Carl Sagan

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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
Still
Particularly
Collectives
Constituent
Hundred
Distant
Astronomical
Example
Picked
Amazes
Almost
Collective
Analyzed
Rich
Unfortunate
Galaxies
Stars
Billion
Constituents
Light
Billions
Galaxy
Stills
Technique
Magical
Spectroscopy

More quotes by Carl Sagan

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We can always take but never give.
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My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.
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We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.
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A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
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A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions.
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We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
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The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.
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We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all.
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There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions.
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There is never only ONE of anything in nature.
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The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.
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If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?
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Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off.
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The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.
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You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years, he said. Think of it more as... ..cultivated.
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Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.
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It seems madness to say, 'We're worried that they're going to become addicted to marijuana' -- there's no evidence whatever that it's an addictive drug, but even if it were, these people are dying, what are we saving them from?
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The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.
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Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?
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Human beings grew up in forests we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky.
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