What He Said...
Jan. 25th, 2013 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teddy_radiatorI have so much respect for Carl Sagan - he had an IQ of about 2 billion, yet he looked at the universe with the wonder and delight of a newborn, fascinated and thrilled by it all. He was eloquent in an almost child-like manner, and never talked down to poor plebs like me. This is a marvelous quote of his, and one that fills me with awe and humility:
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
In future, if I falter, if my faith in my ability wanes, I will remember this: When I am inspired, and the Muse is driving, I am capable of working magic.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
In future, if I falter, if my faith in my ability wanes, I will remember this: When I am inspired, and the Muse is driving, I am capable of working magic.
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Date: 2013-01-25 05:20 am (UTC)*hugs*
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Date: 2013-01-25 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 07:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 11:18 am (UTC)His tools were simple. He would open his heart and allow himself to be filled with the wonders of creation, and then he brought them to us saying, "Here, these are yours, too. Enjoy and marvel at this our beautiful world."
He was a special teacher. The kind of teacher that touched more than your mind, he sought to touch your soul so that you, too, could see and understand the magic that has been with us since the beginning of time... for it IS there. The magic is real, and it is there wherever we look, wherever touch, wherever we are, the magic is all around us if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
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Date: 2013-01-25 11:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 12:46 pm (UTC)::claps hands:: Oh, wonderful!! Carl Sagan had a gift, indeed. Are you familiar with the "Symphony of Science" series of videos? They've taken Sagan's words (and others like him, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson) and set them to a sort of music. This one is my favorite. "We are made of star stuff...we are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
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Date: 2013-01-25 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 01:37 pm (UTC)And for a bit of humor, epic rap battles of history. They do a little cameo of him in Albert Einstein vs Stephen Hawking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k
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Date: 2013-01-25 06:20 pm (UTC)