Did you know you can turn any of the short quotes on our site into an e-card?
Simply locate the quote you'd like to send, and if it fits on our card, you'll see an option for Send as greeting on the left side of the quote.
Or, if you'd like a more classic Greeting card, you can visit our Gaia Greeting Gallery.
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it but the way the atoms are put together. The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
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.
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'
In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.
The notion that science and spirituality are mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential is we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
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