Christine

“My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The tragedy of the human species is it has evolved the capacity of foresight, but refuses to use it.”
― Carl Sagan

“An Indian told them the mountain didn’t want to be climbed—that it cut the rope itself in some mystic way, to keep from being explored—that it grudged anyone discovering its summit. And ‘Grudge Mountain’ it has been, from that day.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Dog of the High Sierras