Cosmos

On IJR

No public IJR answers mention Cosmos yet. As people ask about it and share their answers, they'll appear here.

• “It was Pythagoras who first called heaven kosmos, because it is perfect, and "adorned" with infinite beauty and living beings.”

• “We can allow satellites, planets, suns, the Universe, nay whole systems of Universes to be governed by laws; but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.”

• “It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is — since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.”

• “Whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.”

• “Of the cosmic Gods some make the world be, others animate it, others harmonize it, consisting as it does of different elements; the fourth class keep it when harmonized.”

• “This is the goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Overview

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).