Orbiting Earth Quotes & Sayings

Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing - rather, knowing for sure - that there was a purposefullness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos - that it was beyond man's rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.
There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles.
On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. — Edgar D. Mitchell

Glenn must think he's still in space. He's orbiting the issues faster than he orbited earth. — Ernest Hollings

This isn't how it ends!" Quentin said. "I am the hero of this goddamned story, Ember! Remember? And the hero gets the reward!" "No, Quentin," the ram said. "The hero pays the price." ========== — Anonymous

We are dependent not so much on Earth, the third planet orbiting the sun, as on Gaea, the integrated system that includes, sustains and is shaped by life. — Donella Meadows

Asteroids are deep-space bodies orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, and traveling to one would mean sending humans into solar orbit for the very first time. Facing those challenges of radiation, navigation and life support on a months-long trip millions of miles from home would be a perfect learning journey before a Mars trip. — Rusty Schweickart

I watched the moon landing as a boy, and I thought that was the most exciting thing ever, going into space, orbiting Earth and exploring other planets. That looked fantastic. — David Mackay

It must be a very dour and pessimistic astronomer indeed who seriously doubts that there must be countless numbers of intelligent civilizations scattered throughout the universe on other planets which are orbiting around other stars. An attitude which asserts that man is the only intelligent life form in the universe is intolerably arrogant today ... anyone who holds such an opinion today is, fortunately for those who like to see some progress in human conceptions, something of an intellectual freak equivalent to a believer in the Flat Earth Theory. — Robert K. G. Temple

Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle. — Seth Shostak

Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations. — Joe Bageant

The Europans were building an armada, just like the Sobrukai. But much closer to Earth. They had Foundry Ships orbiting their moon, cranking out fighters and drones - just like those I'd spotted above Sobrukai last night. — Ernest Cline

Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.
Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the "multiverse," in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We have developed from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo, to the modern picture in which the earth is a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe. — Stephen Hawking

If Midnight's Children is India's One Hundred Years of Solitude, then A Suitable Boy must be its War and Peace. — Whitaker

The astronaut in his technical and complex machine, effortlessly orbiting the earth, alone and weightless in the emptiness of space, is the perfect symbol of man today. Despite our domination of the forces of nature and our highly developed technology, we have come to feel ourselves as empty, alienated, anxious, and lonely, without any real inner purpose or meaning to our existence. — Stephen Batchelor

The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon, and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you've ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy. — Jim Lovell

As we gather here today," Clinton said, "the fiftieth woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast fifty women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House. — Rebecca Traister

One's appreciation of, and understanding of the normal or the usual is requisite for any understanding of the abnormal or the unusual. — Milton H. Erickson

In our galaxy alone, we think there are about 10 billion Earth-like planets orbiting stars like our Sun. Given that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, the odds are strong that life has evolved somewhere else. To think that we are the only life in the universe is just an extension of the same arrogance that made us think we were the center of it all. — Chris Hadfield

It's an entire industry focusing on young male viewers that want action and violence. They sell us something that isn't valid. They're selling films like a product. — Norman Jewison

What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning. — Walker Percy

One of the reasons we're here, that we exist at all, is that Earth, cosmically speaking, is in a relatively peaceful place: orbiting our Sun in a near perfect circle. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Because we were orbiting the earth faster than earth spins on its axis, we went around the earth 16 times a day, an earth day, which meant 16 periods of lightness and 16 periods of darkness in 24 hours. Every so often you'd look towards the earth, and often you could see lightness and darkness together, and dawn and sunset were spectacular. — Helen Sharman

Claire ... bitch!'" Her voice sounded raw and hoarse. "You ... think this ... makes us ... friends?'"
"God, no,'" Claire said. "But I think you kinda owe me. — Rachel Caine

The fundamental tension of the profession is the struggle between bold advocacy of the client's interests and the need to establish and hold to limits that prevent advocacy from leading to irrational and inequitable results; and thus the lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system, and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions which that system places on them both. — Scott Turow

Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing
instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Yet, emotionally I could not bring myself to accept either his presence, or his reality. My problem was not a religious problem. God could certainly create as many variations of intelligent humans as he wanted. Presumably God put humans here on this earth, and all non-humans on some other far-away planet orbiting some other far-away star. My problem was a scientific problem. For the Tall White guard to be standing there in the hot sun, for real, would mean that everything I had been taught about Einstein and the Theory of Relativity was simply incorrect. — Charles James Hall

Life can only be enjoyed as one acquires a true perspective of life and death and of the real purpose of life. — Spiros Zodhiates

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm not sure who's right, who's wrong, but it doesn't matter. Sometimes you just have to do what you're told. That's who we are! — Eric Stoltz

Every child's bedroom is as important as a telescope orbiting the planet earth or a philosopher's study. — Jerry Spinelli

Looking out on the second day of our mission, I became aware that in the far distance, there was a distinctive-looking star. It stood out because, while all the other stars stayed exactly the same size and shape, this one got bigger and bigger as we got closer to it. At some point it stopped being a point of light and started becoming something three-dimensional, morphing into a strange bug-like thing with all kinds of appendages. And then, isolated against this inky background, it started to look like a small town.
Which is in fact what it is: an outpost that humans have built, far from Earth. The International Space Station. It's every science fiction book come true, every little kid's dream realized: a large, capable, fully human creation orbiting up in the universe.
And it felt miraculous that soon we'd be docked there, and the next phase of our expedition would begin. — Chris Hadfield

But you say you are conservative - eminently conservative - while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? — George Haven Putnam

There is no gravity in space. There is gravity almost everywhere in space. It is reduced but we can't escape gravity because it is a fundamental force of the universe. Astronauts seem weightless because they are orbiting Earth. They are falling towards Earth but they are moving sufficiently sideways to miss it. So they are constantly falling but never landing. — James Egan

Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago. — Ursula Goodenough

There are lots of things sons shouldn't imagine about their mothers, above all what it was like to become one. — Bauvard

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heel of small
war
until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime — Robert Lowell

We must, like a painter, take time to stand back from our work, to be still, and thus see what's what ... True repose is standing back to survey the activities that fill our days. — William McNamara

Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy. — Seth Lloyd

Our astronauts, when they go orbiting around the earth, they actually come back slightly younger than a twin that they would have on the planet Earth who was stationary. This is called the twin paradox. — Michio Kaku

There is power in a Lady who trusts in God-a lady who has put all her eggs in God's basket. Women possess some gift that touches the heart of God. This gift is so powerful that Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who was known for his great compassion found himself needing the intercession of women to tap into this power. The Lord asked Him to send for the women to let them take up wailing as God knew His ears are open to the cry of distressed women — Mary Maina

However, Galileo got into trouble when he turned his telescope toward a wider horizon. The discovery of the four moons orbiting Jupiter - Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto - suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe about which all celestial bodies orbited. By challenging the geocentric model of the Solar System, Galileo found himself accused of heresy and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. — Andrew Thomas

If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years. — Malcolm X

The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil - these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this is why we try to outshine the heavens with our cities and make theatrical events of our simple lives. — Christopher Hawke