Li

“When too much cynicism threatens to engulf us, it is buoying to remember how pervasive goodness is.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

“Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, immense, indifferent Universe in which humans are relegated to obscurity. But I see the emergence in our consciousness of a Universe of a magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined. And if much about the Universe can be understood in terms of a few simple laws of Nature, those wishing to believe in God can certainly ascribe those beautiful laws to a Reason underpinning all of Nature. My own view is that it is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

“That was one manifestation of fear, the voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed