A Quote by Hippolyte Taine

Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!

Hippolyte Taine

Quote Topics

Boundless Earth Grain Grain Of Sand How Our Overwhelming Own Sand Small Solar Space Sphere Vast

Quote Author

Hippolyte Taine
French - Critic
April 21, 1828 - March 5, 1893

If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe, our whole solar system would be less than one grain of sand.

Seth Shostak

As you know, this little grain of sand has mass. A very small mass, but mass nonetheless." And because this grain of sand has mass, it therefore exerts gravity. Again, too small to feel, but there." Now," Katherine said, "if we take trilions of these sand grains and let them attract one another to form... say, the moon, then their combined gravtiy is enough to move entire ocreans and drag the tides back and forth across our planet.

Dan Brown

I believe seeing earth a small blue ball in the vast dark ocean of space, gives you a new perspective on life and what is important. You can see how small we are as compared to the universe and how fragile our lives are.

Anousheh Ansari

When you accept everything, everything is beyond dimensions. The earth is not great nor a grain of sand small. In the realm of Great Activity picking up a grain of sand is the same as taking up the whole universe. To save one sentient being is to save all sentient beings. Your efforts of this moment to save one person is the same as the eternal merit of Buddha.

Shunryu Suzuki

The torments of hell abide for ever.... If all the earth and sea were sand, and every thousandth year a bird should come, and take away one grain of this sand, it would be a long time ere that vast heap of sand were emptied; yet, if after all that time the damned may come out of hell, there were some hope; but this word EVER breaks the heart.

Thomas Watson

People need to be made conscious of a very simple reality: we have no choice but to share this planet, this small blue sphere floating in the vast reaches of space, with all of our fellow 'passengers.'

Daisaku Ikeda

I know that's really horrible, but that's how I do it in my head. I'm going to die. It doesn't matter. I don't matter. I'm a grain of sand. As a grain of sand, I may as well go out and relate to people and enjoy my short time on this planet that I have. Who knows what's coming next?

Kathleen Hanna

I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.

Debra Fischer

The 4th sort of creatures... which moved through the 3 former sorts, were incredibly small, and so small in my eye that I judged, that if 100 of them lay [stretched out] one by another, they would not equal the length of a grain of course Sand; and according to this estimate, ten hundred thousand of them could not equal the dimensions of a grain of such course Sand. There was discover'd by me a fifth sort, which had near the thickness of the former, but they were almost twice as long. The first time bacteria were observed.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

To settle space, we will have to develop the ability to harvest and utilize the resources of the solar system, such as ores, ice, and the rays of the sun itself at levels of efficiency that will transform our relationship to our own planet Earth.

Rick Tumlinson

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.

James Jeans

The frontier in space, embodied in the space colony, is one in which the interactions between humans and their environment is so much more sensitive and interactive and less tolerant of irresponsibility than it is on the whole surface of the Earth. We are going to learn how to relate to the Earth and our own natural environment here by looking seriously at space colony ecologies.

Rusty Schweickart

The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.

Anaximander

Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.

Truman Capote

Distrust even Mathematics; albeit so sublime and highly perfected, we have here a machine of such delicacy it can only work in vacuo, and one grain of sand in the wheels is enough to put everything out of gear. One shudders to think to what disaster such a grain of sand may bring a Mathematical brain. Remember Pascal.