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60+ (BEST) Quotes by Carl Sagan Has Changed My Life

Quotes by Carl Sagan speak volumes about your personality and what you stand for. No matter what you do in life, these inspiring quotes will help you in your life,

Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, astrochemist, and author. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Sagan is widely considered to be one of the most influential scientists of all time.

Here are some of his best influential quotes and sayings for you, read these quotes and explore yourself.

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Quotes by Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, a great scientist, author and educator that gave us memorable quotes for all times.

Carl Sagan is one of my favorite thinkers and I would highly recommend reading the quotes posted below. I have included the best quotes by Carl Sagan in this post in order to expand your knowledge.

  • “Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.” –Carl Sagan
  • “It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.” –Carl Sagan
  • “We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” –Carl Sagan
  • “The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” –Carl Sagan
  • “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” –Carl Sagan
Quotes by Carl Sagan
  • “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.” –Carl Sagan
  • “We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster” –Carl Sagan

“What a marvelous cooperative arrangement – plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.” –Carl Sagan

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  • “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” –Carl Sagan
  • “An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.” –Carl Sagan
  • “We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.” –Carl Sagan
  • “The visions we offer our children shape the future.” –Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Quotes Intelligence

A page with inspirational quotes or motivational quotes is nothing new, but there’s always room for new quotes. Carl Sagan has some of the most famous quotes in history. Here are some that I have chosen out of the thousands he has said over his life.

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  • “One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” –Carl Sagan
  • “In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.” –Carl Sagan
  • “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.” –Carl Sagan
  • “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” –Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan Quotes Intelligence
  • “The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.” –Carl Sagan
  • “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” –Carl Sagan
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“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.” –Carl Sagan

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  • “An organism at war with itself is doomed.” –Carl Sagan
  • “We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have to exaggerate. There’s wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature’s a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.” –Carl Sagan
  • “If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.” –Carl Sagan

Related- Quotes by George Orwell»

  • “Humans who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.” –Carl Sagan
  • “It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.” –Carl Sagan
  • “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” –Carl Sagan
  • “There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.” –Carl Sagan

Famous Quotes by Carl Sagan

Read these most famous quotes by Carl Sagan will make you think completely in a different way.

  • “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” –Carl Sagan
  • “When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.” –Carl Sagan
  • “A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?” –Carl Sagan
  • “One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is spe aking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.” –Carl Sagan
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  • “The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.” –Carl Sagan
  • “The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” –Carl Sagan
Famous Quotes by Carl Sagan
  • “People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.” –Carl Sagan
  • “We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” –Carl Sagan
  • “It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.” –Carl Sagan

Related- Quotes by Ayn Rand»

  • “Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.” –Carl Sagan
  • “A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage – at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.” –Carl Sagan
  • “You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they’ll behave. You want people to believe in God so they’ll obey the law. That’s the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” –Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Quotes Meaning of Life

So grab these quotes by Carl Sagan as they’ll certainly motivate your day. There will definitely be a quote or two that will resonate with you in your life.

  • “Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.” –Carl Sagan
  • “If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business, if there was any competition.” –Carl Sagan
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  • “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
  • –Carl Sagan
  • “The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)” –Carl Sagan
  • “Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.” –Carl Sagan
  • “We can’t help it. Life looks for life.” –Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan Quotes Meaning of Life
  • “Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.” –Carl Sagan
  • “If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?” –Carl Sagan
  • “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” –Carl Sagan
  • “A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time . proof that humans can work magic.” –Carl Sagan
  • “If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.” –Carl Sagan

Related- Quotes by Carl Jung»

  • “My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesnt believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.” –Carl Sagan
  • “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.” –Carl Sagan
  • “The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” –Carl Sagan
  • “One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.” –Carl Sagan

Final Words

This post is a collection of quotes from Carl Sagan, a prominent scientist, astronomer and astrobiologist. Many of the quotes are about science and space which is fitting since he was an astronomer by trade.

These quotes from Carl Sagan will also help you to see the inspiration in everything and make you believe that the world really has some pretty amazing things hidden within it.

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