When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe" — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.
We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
We live on the surface of a star, and we are made of the dust of stars. The atoms in our bodies were forged in the hearts of dying stars billions of years ago.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole.
Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.
When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel every quiver that passes through them as a shock to our own nerves.
We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We have come from the interstellar medium and into the form of conscious beings able to ask the supreme questions.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they are made of stardust literally.
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they are made of starstuff which was assembled here, billions of years ago, in the course of the formation of the Earth as a planet. For this reason the constituents of our bodies are literally and intimately connected with the rest of the Universe.
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they have formed in stars and at the centers of galaxies, and have passed through uncounted transformations. The yesterday of the atom is the history of the universe.
Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be.
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; we are made of stellar material, and the iron in our blood was forged in dying stars.
The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they have formed the cores of stars—gone through many transformations of the universe and of all the transformations of matter in space and time we are their inheritors.
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
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