enlightenment

"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 [1934-1996]

Carl Sagan's "Contact" read by Jodie Foster

 

dessert

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
- Carl Sagan

physics superheros

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
- Brian Cox quoting Carl Sagan

Georgia O'Keeffe, Starlight Night, 1917

"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring."
- Carl Sagan

"The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer."
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 29

galaxies > people

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
- Carl Sagan

Hindu Rigveda

Kushan devotee couple, around the Buddha, Brahma and Indra. 2nd century CE, Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara. [Image provided under GNU License]

The universe dies and then is reborn every several million years, representing a day in the life of the Hindu deity Brahma, or Buddhism's mahakalpa, the "great eon" between destruction and rebirth.

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."
- Carl Sagan [1934-1996]

billions and billions

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
- Carl Sagan [1934-1996]

According to mentalfloss.com:

“Billions and billions.” Carl Sagan never said this, and he even explained that he never said it in the first chapter of his book … which, incidentally, was titled Billions & Billions. You can’t say the guy didn’t have a sense of humor. The quote actually originated from Johnny Carson’s impression of Sagan. 

Sagan on the pre-socratic philosophers: