Theme: “All We Are Is Dust in the Wind”

📖 Excerpts Library

But the World Itself Is Only a Speck of Dust

‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny — helpless!

Source: 1984 by George Orwell

A Lonely Speck in the Great Enveloping Cosmic Dark

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in...

Source: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

The Earth Was a Mere Point in a Vast Encompassing Cosmos

It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred thousand times farther away, might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstance and condition. It had been well understood...

Source: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

Our Obsession With Nationalism Is Nowhere in Evidence

And yet there is no sign of humans in this picture, not our reworking of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves: We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between...

Source: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

The Centre of the World Was Not a Position of Honor

But the actual tendency of the geocentric system was, for the medieval mind, precisely the opposite. For the centre of the world was not a position of honor; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom...

Source: The Great Chain of Being by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

Being a Sphere, It Therefore Had to Be a Finite Object

Being a sphere, it therefore had to be a finite object, with a finite—that is, limited—surface area. With this awakening the ideas of world trade and related colonial proprietary rights were born.

Source: JFK by L. Fletcher Prouty

Viewing the Earth from Outer Space

The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space. It is the experience of seeing first-hand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately...

Source: Overview effect

Earth Is But a Tiny Speck Whirling Around Our Sun

Thus, we can begin to think of the immense universe in which our green mantled earth is but a tiny speck whirling around our sun, one of the many stars that range throughout space-time.

Source: Nature and Human Nature by Lawrence K. Frank