Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I'll go out at night and look up at the stars and think, 'How ridiculously inconsequential I am in the scheme of things.'

Starting with the lyrics, 'Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I'm a king, I'm the dirt, God within me shine,' the first half of '6 Weeks' delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

I'm too small for the universe to revolve around me. It is a huge relief!

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

I am the One, and I see all. But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

I try to keep this in mind when tied in to a rope 75 feet up in a tree... The history of ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of let-downs for those who like to believe we are special.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

But I know I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead — in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death — the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human — feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light - all of it part of navigating the unknown.

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do. . .

We're just fragile machines programmed with a false sense of our own importance. And every now and then the universe sends a reminder that we don't really matter to it.

There seems to be no end to the senseless wickedness done on this little planet in a minor solar system, and we puny mortals appear to be decreasing in importance so far as the universe is concerned.

But my later experience has taught me two lessons: first, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred; second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

A mere 400 years after our fall from the center of the universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

Our mechanics are engineered so that we can survive quite a lot, but I think our need to be loved is so great that it’s the thing that damages us the most.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.

If any man can convince me and bring home to me that I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.

Man, living, feeling man, is the easy sport of the over-mastering present.

We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead - like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe - far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.