When a load of bricks, dumped on a corner lot, can arrange themselves into a house; when a handful of springs and screws and wheels, emptied on a desk, can gather themselves into a watch, then and not until then will it seem sensible, to some of us at least, to believe that all these thousands or millions of worlds could have been created, balanced and set to revolving in their separate orbits -- all without any directing intelligence at all.
In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.
The crux is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.
The universe is then one, infinite, immobile. It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobilizable..
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
I don't pretend to understand the Universe -- it's a great deal bigger than I am.
Nothing is lost yet, nothing broken, and yet the cold blue word is spoken: say goodbye now to the Sun, the days of love and leaves are done.
I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.
If there is nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe.
If that's how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what's left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning).
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces between stars -- on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home to scare myself with my own desert places.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
Like buried treasures, the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times...
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
To display his eternal attributes in their inexhaustible variety, the Lord made the green fields of time and space.
— Jami
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.
No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe.
It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.
Nothing is accidental in the universe -- this is one of my Laws of Physics -- except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.
Nature recycles itself. History repeats itself. Religion has faith in itself. Technology creates itself. Humanity loves itself.
The universe is one of God's thoughts.
The universe is wider than our views of it.
Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, What's in it for me?
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes -- but is that all?