Milky Way Quotes

“Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“Me? Beautiful? I'm plain as cardboard.

That may be how you see yourself, but the rest of the world would be hard to agree. You shine brighter than the Milky Way.
Now there are those who might try to take that from you, but you don't have to give it away. Keep on shining Pattyn.
And when the right young man comes along, he'll love you all the more for giftin' this sad planet with your light.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Burned

“As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among these billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime.

As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space.

This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”
― Jimmy Carter

“I believe, if there is some sort of higher power, the universe is it. Whenever religious people ask me where the universe came from, I tell them that it has always been here, and was never created. The Big Bang theory is based on the fact that the universe is expanding right now. And if you rewind the tape, the universe appears to be shrinking. If you rewind the tape far enough, eventually the universe must be just one singular point. Or so the theory goes. But what if the universe has not always been expanding? What if it's pulsating, and one pulse takes trillions of years, and right now the universe is inhaling, and before that, trillions of years ago, it was exhaling?”
― Oliver Gaspirtz

“Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.”
― Henri Poincaré, Science and Method

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars—as starts to thee appear
Soon in the galaxy, that milky way
Which mightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powder'd wiht stars.”
― John Milton Paradise Lost

“In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.”
― Bertrand Russell

“For many years I have been a night watchman of the Milky Way galaxy.”
― Bart Bok

“...loveliness is the Milky Way... but also all the myriad points of radiance streaming from your beauty...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Only the spider paid no mind when the unicorn called softly to her through the open door. Arachne was busy with a web which looked to her as though the Milky Way had begun to fall like snow. The unicorn whispered, 'Weaver, freedom is better, freedom is better,' but the spider fled unhearing up and down her iron loom.”
― Peter S. Beagle

“I think that the event which, more than anything else, led me to the search for ways of making more powerful radio telescopes, was the recognition, in 1952, that the intense source in the constellation of Cygnus was a distant galaxy—1000 million light years away. This discovery showed that some galaxies were capable of producing radio emission about a million times more intense than that from our own Galaxy or the Andromeda nebula, and the mechanisms responsible were quite unknown. ... [T]he possibilities were so exciting even in 1952 that my colleagues and I set about the task of designing instruments capable of extending the observations to weaker and weaker sources, and of exploring their internal structure.”
― Martin Ryle

“all hopes there, so close to each other,
are pulled into the void every night;
when a band of pale twinkles milking the way
across the divine breadth of sky
where every heart belongs.
- From the poem "The Universe In Blossom”
― Munia Khan

“But what captured him was a light in the river
folding open and open
blood, heart and stones
shimmering like the Milky Way.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”
― Jimmy Carter

“Timmy has no intention of going on the trip. He has never been on a sightseeing tour before and according to him, he is never going on one, end of discussion. Who wants to see a stupid planet called Earth, anyway?”
― Amanda Dubin, Last Stop, Earth

“There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“The Milky Way stretched overhead like the rainbow after a storm. It was a promise that there was light everywhere, even far away in the darkest of places.”
― Candice Jarrett, Mortal Tether

“And I suddenly feel like Pinocchio after he’s been swallowed; dome roof with curved steel beams like a whale’s ribs, the moon and Milky Way right there at the yawning shutter of its mouth.”
― Danielle Binks, Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology

“In the distance, the Himalayan range flared into fluorescence, as its snowy peaks reflected the moonlight back at the velvet sky, split into half by the shimmering strip of the Milky Way.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“There is nothing as powerful to the human psyche as the mental image educed by viewing a magnificent vista. We comprehend the paltriest of our bodies whenever a single person travels across an open desert or an immense prairie, stands on top of a mountain range, walks in the sand in front of a furious sea, or lies on their back and takes in the magnificence of the misty span of the Milky Way. Each act of magnification places us in touch with the finiteness and irrelevance of our trifling personhood. We can only view the broad expanse of the desert and steppe, the sheerness of a mountaintop, the immensity of the sea, and the immeasurable vastness of the galaxy with an overpowering sense of both horror and awe as their grand span transcends human scale. The overpowering physicality of these vistas stands as a testament to their cold indifference to the mortality of humankind. The sheer immensity of nature’s breadth beseeches us to consider the unthinkable: we are transient beings. We are mortal; we are mere sparklers burning fitfully until our spurting light completely fizzles out.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Looking into space from Antarctica feels like looking into space from space. On a night like this--no wind, no weather, no moon--the smear of the Milky Way looks more like a celestial fire, brimming with colors you'd never see from anyplace else on Earth.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“The Milky Way came down just over there, to wrap the night earth in its naked embrace. There was a terrible voluptuousness about it.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“Last night was beautiful, the sky filled with stars and the Milky Way looking like a scarf of sequins.”
― W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight

“I follow the road south in darkness, the slight ocean breeze cool and refreshing, the moon on my left, the muted roar of the Benguela Current to my right; dead ahead, the Southern Cross hangs lopsided in a sky the colour of Indian ink. The stars tonight are extraordinarily clear; the Bushman call the Milky Way 'The Backbone of the Night'. An aeroplane in the night sky floats past, a lonely firefly exiled to outer space because of its abnormal size.”
― Fran Sandham, Traversa

“How minute I am. I am nothing. I am just a person in a building, in a street, in a city, in a state, in a country, in a continent, on a planet, of a solar system, of a galaxy, of a Milky Way, of a cluster, of a universe of multiverses. I am nothing. How minute I am.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Smiling Brahma

“With more Trees on Earth than Stars in the Milky way, Such a Blessing is life”
― Rhys Blanco, Affirmations for Glowing skin

“Among the countless galactic roses, the Spiral stands out, making honor to its sisters. It rests there, almost delicately, as if placed upon the black velvet of space by two white-gloved hands that wouldn't dare touch it—a fair and terrible diamond, simple in its shape yet intricate beyond comprehension.”
― Kevin Lacoste, The Spiral Book: The Five Humans: A Science Fantasy Epic