“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Jane Goodall

“Whatever is true spiritually and ethically about our circumstances… there is no doubt there are spiritual truths… there are spiritual experiences human beings can have…and there are ethical truths. Whatever is true about that has to transcend culture; it has to transcend our cultural differences. 

Consequently, it makes no sense at all to have one’s spiritual life pegged to rumors of ancient miracles. What we need is a discourse about ethics and spiritual experience that is as unconstrained by ancient ignorance as the discourse of science already is. Science really does transcend the vagaries of culture.

There’s a reason why we don’t talk about Christian physics and Muslim mathematics. It’s because an experiment run here and in Baghdad actually works in both places if it’s teasing out something fundamental about the nature of the universe. That is true ethically; that is true spiritually." Sam Harris

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.” Edwin Hubble

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.” Buckminster Fuller

“ (…) star stuff, the ash of stellar alchemy had emerged into consciousness. 

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are creatures of the cosmos and always hunger to know our origins, to understand our connection with the universe. How did everything come to be? Every culture on the planet has devised its own response to the riddle posed by the universe. Every culture celebrates the cycles of life and nature. There are many different ways of being human. 

But, an extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars. Our ancestors knew that their survival depended on understanding the heavens. They built observatories and computers to predict the changing of the seasons by the motions in the skies. We are all of us descended from astronomers.

The discovery that there is order in the universe, that there are laws of nature, is the foundation on which science is built on today. Our conception of the cosmos – all of modern science and technology –is traced back to questions raised by the stars. 

(…) Science is a collective enterprise which embraces many cultures and spans the generations in every age and sometimes in the most unlikely places there are those who wish with a great deal of passion to understand the world. There is no way of knowing where the next discovery will come from. What dream of the mind’s eye will remake the world. 

(…) We humans long to be connected with our origins so we create rituals. Science is another way to experience this longing. It also connects us with our origins, and it too has its rituals and its commandments. Its only sacred truth is that there are no sacred truths. All assumptions must be critically examined. Arguments from authority are worthless. Whatever is inconsistent with the facts – no matter how fond of it we are – must be discarded or revised. Science is not perfect. It is often misused. It is only a tool, but it is the best tool we have – self-correcting, ever changing, applicable to everything. With this tool we vanquish the impossible; with the methods of science we have begun to explore the cosmos.

(…) And we, we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we have begun at least to wonder about our origins – star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth, and perhaps throughout the cosmos. 

Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring!” Carl Sagan

“We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That’s why science is exciting - because we don’t know. Science is all about things we don’t understand. The Public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it’s not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That’s how it makes progress.” Freeman Dyson

“Spirit” comes from the Latin word “to breathe.” What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word “spiritual” that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. 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 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 somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.“

"In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind." Carl Sagan

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” Richard Feynman

“I am born into an environment - I know not whence I came nor whither I go nor who I am. This is my situation as yours, every single one of you. The fact that everyone always was in this same situation, and always will be, tells me nothing. Our burning question as to whence and whither - all we can ourselves observe about it is the present environment. That is why we are eager to find out about it as much as we can. That is science, learning, knowledge; it is the true source of every spiritual endeavor of man. We try to find out as much as we can about the spatial and temporal surroundings of the place in which we find ourselves put by birth. And as we try, we delight in it, we find it extremely interesting."  Erwin Schrödinger

“You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right – at least if you have any experience – because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.” Richard Feynman

“Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.” Richard Feynman