“Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.”
“They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the same crack in the earth from which the night emerged.”
“Ours is an overpopulated, under educated, shithole in the throes of mass extinctions - it s a wonderful world.”
“This one phrase, It is my life, I will do what I want, has done more damage than good. People choose to ignore the spirit and derive the meaning that is convenient to them. Such people have tied this phrase to selfishness and I m sure that was not the intent. These people forget that we don t live in isolation. What you do affects me and what I do affects you. We are connected. We have to realize that we are sharing this planet and we must learn to behave responsibly. There are two kinds of people in this world--takers and givers. Takers eat well and givers sleep well. Givers have high self-esteem, a positive attitude, and they serve society. By serving society, I do not mean a run-of-the-mill pseudo leader-turned- politician who serves himself by pretending to serve others. As human beings, we all have the need to receive and take. But a healthy personality with high self-esteem is one that not only has its need to take but also to give.”
“While understanding that we need this matrix to experience life on earth, we should also be able to enjoy a certain sense of detachment from it, and thus feel more empowered to make our own choices. We should thus come out feeling much more in control of our own personal journeys.”
“You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was designed to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow timed to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.”
“Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…”
“These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.”
“This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?”
“Our commitment to next generations is to bring heaven on earth, and not nuclear annihilation. There is still hope, we must act before time slips.”
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, For thou must die.”
“When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there s only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.”
“In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.”
“The mother-earth may not like the way we preserve her...if any.”
“Unless you understand the pain and sufferings of the people, trees, birds and the nature, how can you understand God.”
“If Earth had a soccer team, everyone on Earth would wear the same jersey to support it. There’d be no them, there’d only be us.”
“SONG OF SUNSET ON THE RIVER A strip of water s spread in the setting sun, Half the river s emerald, half is red. I love the third night of the ninth month, The dew is like pearl; the moon like a bow.”