Cosmological Quotes & Sayings

Allegorical Fall As we know from the remarks at the beginning of this present work and spread throughout, even in antiquity not all believers thought the Bible was entirely historical. Speaking of Philo's allegorical interpretation of the fall of mankind as found in Genesis, for example, Geddes recounted a list of others in antiquity who understood biblical tales as cosmological and allegorical, not literal: — D.M. Murdock

my favorite is the cosmological argument. But cosmological and teleological arguments don't touch people where they live. The — William Lane Craig

We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus. — Philip Wollen

For all I know, most practicing scientists may have no opinion about the overarching cosmological questions to which this materialist reductionism provides an answer. Their detailed research and substantive findings do not in general depend on or imply either that or any other answer to such questions. But among the scientists and philosophers who do express views about the natural order as a whole, reductive materialism is widely assumed to be the only serious possibility. — Thomas Nagel

I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. — Henry Miller

What should you do when you find you have made a mistake like that? Some people never admit that they are wrong and continue to find new, and often mutually inconsistent, arguments to support their case - as Eddington did in opposing black hole theory. Others claim to have never really supported the incorrect view in the first place or, if they did, it was only to show that it was inconsistent. It seems to me much better and less confusing if you admit in print that you were wrong. A good example of this was Einstein, who called the cosmological constant, which he introduced when he was trying to make a static model of the universe, the biggest mistake of his life. — Stephen Hawking

As a rationalist, pragmatist, and a scientist I rarely involve myself in the cosmological arguments of the creation of the universe. — Debasish Mridha

Anything that begins has a cause... — Mario Diana

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. — Lewis Thomas

Einstein wrestled with a problem back before we even knew the universe was expanding, and he was looking for a way to keep the universe from collapsing. And so he discovered, in his theory of gravity, something like this dark energy - he called it a cosmological constant - could play this role, pushing things away. — Adam Riess

I like Aristotle, but I don't agree with his cosmological argument about god. — Debasish Mridha

All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view. — Joseph Campbell

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the one real, time-drenched universe, everything has a particular history precisely because it is finite, and not part of an infinite array. Moreover, the cosmological use of the infinite serves to mask the failure of a physical theory taken beyond the boundaries of its proper domain of application. The most notable instance is the inference in contemporary cosmology of an infinite initial singularity from the field equations of general relativity. Finally, the admission of the mathematical infinite into natural science effaces the difference, which we emphasize, between nature and mathematics. Nature works in time, with which mathematics has trouble. Mathematics offers, among other things, the infinite, which nature abhors. — Lee Smolin

This puzzling discrepancy prompted the development of the controversial cosmological theory known as the Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us. — Robert Kroese

Since Cervantes's magnificent Knight's quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, no object seems beyond reach. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?] — Carl Sagan

Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist civilization, what will we think? — Immanuel Wallerstein

For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau. — Bertrand Russell

THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMULATION — William Lane Craig

Much later, when I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. — George Gamow

In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it's a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?49 — John C. Lennox

We are the product of this universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of this cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance. — Janna Levin

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time. — Ken Hollings

Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space. — Walter Isaacson

[T]he whole talk about the absolute, is nothing but the cosmological proof incognito. This proof, in consequence of the case brought against it by Kant, deprived of all right and declared outlawed, dare no longer show itself in its true form, and therefore appears in all kinds of disguises - now in distinguished form, concealed under intellectual intuition or pure thought now as a suspicious vagabond, half begging, half demanding what it wants in more unpretending philosophemes. If an absolute must absolutely be had, then I will give one which is far better fitted to meet all the demands which are made on such a thing than these visionary phantoms: it is matter. It has no beginning, and it is imperishable; thus it is really independent, and quod per se est et per se concipitur; from its womb all proceeds, and to it all returns; what more can be desired of an absolute? — Arthur Schopenhauer

His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, "Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity."9 On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself. Einstein — Walter Isaacson

The latter had assumed the reality of the external world on the credit of God; and here, of course, it seems strange that, whereas the other theistic philosophers endeavour to demonstrate the existence of God from that of the world, Descartes, on the contrary, proves the existence of the world first from the existence and trustworthiness of God; it is the cosmological proof the other way round. Here too Malebranche goes a step farther and teaches that we see all things immediately in God himself. This certainly is equivalent to explaining something unknown by something even more unknown. — Arthur Schopenhauer

In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists in constant chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adult's legends, cosmological myths, and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt. — Yi-Fu Tuan

Buddhist nirvana ... is based on egolessness and is not anthropocentric but rather cosmological. In Buddhism, humans and the things of the universe are equally subject to change, equally subject to transitoriness or transmigration. A person cannot achieve emancipation from the cycle of birth and death until he or she can eliminate a more universal problem: the transience common to all things in the universe. — Masao Abe

The standard cosmological theory
an expanding universe
does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient conundrum, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing, and the "axiom" that "Nothing is unstable' rivals in scholastic absurdity anything Aquinas may have said eight hundred years ago and can only be postulated given the reality of something, whereby it becomes a self-evident and unarguable tautology. — R. Joseph Hoffmann

Third, this allowed us to propose what we called the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here we interpret the wavefunction for an object as describing not some funky imaginary ensemble of possibilities for what the object might be doing, but rather the actual spatial collection of identical copies of the object that exist in our infinite space. Moreover, quantum uncertainty that you experience simply reflects your inability to self-locate in the Level I multiverse, i.e., to know which of your infinitely many copies throughout space is the one having your subjective perceptions. — Max Tegmark

In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning. — Victor J. Stenger

Fourth is Lambda, the cosmological constant, which determines the acceleration of the universe. — Michio Kaku

They say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction. — G. Willow Wilson

Our universe, extending immensely far beyond our present horizon, may itself be just one member of a possibly infinite ensemble. This 'multiverse' concept, though speculative, is a natural extension of current cosmological theories, which gain credence because they account for things that we do observe. The physical laws and geometry could be different in other universes, and this offers a new perspective on the seemingly special values that the six numbers take in ours. — Martin J. Rees

Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God - the design argument of Paley - updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one ... Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument. — Edward Robert Harrison

There's no observational evidence that I know of that indicates electric and magnetic forces are important on cosmological scales. — Jeremiah P. Ostriker

We are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual — Paul Ricoeur

Once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual — Stephen King

The claim that the universe *began* with the big bang has no basis in current physical and cosmological knowledge. The observations confirming the big bang do not rule out the possibility of a prior universe. — Victor J. Stenger

In addition to the interpretive frameworks of the mythological (classical-Greek), the theological (Medieval-Christian), and the existential (modern-European), would it be possible to shift our framework to something we can only call cosmological? Could such a cosmological view be understood not simply as the view from inter-stellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view? — Eugene Thacker

[Author's Note: Barbara Hand Clow gives a much more detailed description and story about the photon band and the cosmological changes in dimensional relationships we are undergoing in her latest book, The Pleiadian Agenda: A New Cosmology for the Age of Light.] — Amorah Quan Yin

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. — Walker Percy

If cosmological theory were dominated by women, who are no strangers to cycles, how can we know for sure that we wouldn't then be told that the oscillating universe is the more aesthetically fulfilling alternative? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects ... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple. — Anatol Rapoport

In other words, the idea is the there's a fourth level of parallel universes that's vastly larger than the three we've encountered so far, corresponding to different mathematical structures. The first three levels correspond to noncommunicating parallel universes within the same mathematical structure: Level I simply means distant regions from which light hasn't yet had time to reach us, Level II covers regions that are forever unreachable because of the cosmological inflation of intervening space, and Level III, Everett's "Many Worlds," involves noncommunicating parts of the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics. Whereas all the parallel universes at Levels I, II and III obey the same fundamental mathematical equations (describing quantum mechanics, inflation, etc.), Level IV parallel universes dance to the tunes of different equations, corresponding to different mathematical structures. Figure 12.2 illustrates this four-level multiverse hierarchy, one of the core ideas of this book. — Max Tegmark

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it). — Umberto Eco

Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe. — Gaston Bachelard

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior. — Joyce Carol Oates

Nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for
Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.
Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know. — Charles Yu

The first theological insight I learned from Gregory of Nyssa - and I suspect the last to which I shall cling when all others fall away - is that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim, but also an eschatological claim about the world's relation to God, and hence a moral claim about the nature of God in himself. In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness.

(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17) — David Bentley Hart

Ecology movements, futurism, feminism, urbanism, protest and disarmament, personal individuation cannot alone save the world from the catastrophe inherent in our very idea of the world. They require a cosmological vision that saves the phenomenon 'world' itself, a move in soul that goes beyond measures of expediency to the archetypal source of our world's continuing peril: the fateful neglect, the repression, of the anima mundi. — James Hillman

Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms. — Rudolf Bultmann

Well, it is generally considered - though not always true - that the wife of a man so honoured is likely also to be worthy of the honour, and so it is accorded her. In the event it is false, and I have known that to be so in more than one circumstance , it is still accorded her in deference to her husband."
~Sherlock Holmes, with respect to aristocratic titles — Stephanie Osborn

There is more than one evolution. There are cosmological, geological, biological and sociological evolutions. The scientists of evolution say so. When I think about man, religion and art, I do not see any of those evolutions. — Alija Izetbegovic

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation. — Lawrence Durrell

Christine Gray wrote in her remarkable 1986 PhD dissertation, Thailand: The Soteriological State in the 1970s: Any study of contemporary Thai society must account for the U.S. influence on that polity and the mutual denial of that influence. Thailand's relationship with the United States is complex, heavily disguised and, in many instances, actively denied by the leaders of both countries... In many cases, it is difficult if not impossible to determine the extent of American influence in Thailand. Thailand is a nation of secrets: of secret bombings and air bases during the Vietnam War, of secret military pacts and aid agreements, of secret business transactions and secret ownership of businesses and joint venture corporations. This is precisely the point; the American presence has taken on powerful cosmological, religious and even mythic overtones. The American influence on the Thai economy and polity has become a symbol of uncertainty, of men's inability to know the truth. — Andrew MacGregor Marshall

In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system. — Italo Calvino

Here I am taking a psychological characteristic such as the need to know where in the world we are (orientation) and show that when this need was first made visible and expressed graphically the result was a cosmological map. The need for orientation may have been in the first place to relate persons spatially to the physical world in which they lived. But it was equally urgent to represent ideas about mankind's origin and future. Under the influence of anxiety and stress, outwardly perceptible reality may even have taken second place. The observer then visualized according to his preconceptions. This can still happen. At any rate, some early world maps were a — John Fielding

Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement. — Steven Weinberg

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive. — Lee Smolin

That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire. — Joseph Heller