Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I don't want to believe. I want to know.”

— Carl Sagan

2. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

— Carl Sagan

3. “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About Stars

4. “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

— Carl Sagan

5. “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”

— Carl Sagan

6. “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes

7. “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes, Art Quotes

8. “We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”

— Carl Sagan

9. “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

— Carl Sagan

10. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes

11. “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes

12. “We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”

— Carl Sagan

13. “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”

— Carl Sagan

14. “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

15. “Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes

16. “In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”

— Carl Sagan

17. “The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes

18. “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”

— Carl Sagan

19. “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Science Quotes, Quotes About Thinking, Knowledge Quotes

20. “You are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.”

— Carl Sagan

21. “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

— Carl Sagan

22. “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Past Quotes

23. “If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”

— Carl Sagan

24. “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About Stars, Quotes About Ocean

25. “We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About Stars, Quotes About the Body

26. “We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Space Quotes

27. “Your god is too small for my universe.”

— Carl Sagan

28. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

29. “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Science Quotes, Technology Quotes

30. “Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About Home

31. “Don’t judge everyone else by your own limited experience.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Judging Quotes

32. “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

— Carl Sagan

33. “After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it’s burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being – and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About Stars

34. “Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be – we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.”

— Carl Sagan

35. “All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Science Quotes, Space Quotes, Quotes About Civilization

36. “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

— Carl Sagan

37. “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Understanding Quotes

38. “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Lonely Quotes

39. “Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About the Body

40. “Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust.”

— Carl Sagan

41. “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 magic.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Book Quotes

42. “You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.”

— Carl Sagan

43. “The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About the Brain, Understanding Quotes

44. “The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Science Quotes, Quotes About Ideas

45. “Every star may be a sun to someone.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Quotes About Stars

46. “To live in the hearts of others is to never die in those we leave behind.”

— Carl Sagan

47. “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Witty Quotes

48. “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Science Quotes

49. “There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

— Carl Sagan

50. “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Science Quotes