The great object of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul, to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to its great Author and Sustainer. Considering this as the ultimate end of science, no branch of it can surely claim precedence of Astronomy. No other science furnishes such a palpable embodiment of the abstractions which lie at the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a foot-ball; of starry hosts—suns like our own—numberless as the sands on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite spaces

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

My construction will cover the entire Universe.

Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.

Contemplated as one grand whole, astronomy is the most beautiful monument of the human mind; the noblest record of its intelligence.

It's all for him.
The ultimate goal of the universe is to show the glory of God. It is the reason for everything that exists, including you. God made it all for his glory. Without God's glory, there would be nothing.

We would wish to discover the Plan of the Universe, and the means employed by the Eternal Architect in the execution of his magnificent design. We will first contemplate the System of which we make a part, and of which our Sun is the center. Thence we will ascend towards those Suns and those innumerable Worlds which are scattered through the immensity of space.

Your purpose...should always be to know...the whole that was intended to be known.

[H]ow much of the fundamentals of Astronomy may be obtained with the coarsest observation with the unaided eye. ...the science which is thus obtained by personal observations is vastly superior (as far as it goes) to that which is obtained by any other method. ...The knowledge ...inferred from actual personal observation carries with it a degree of reality and certainty, as the veritable science of external objects, which nothing else can give.

My dearest wish was to reach for the sky. I actually wanted to be out there, up in the sky, among those stars, studying them, flying close to them, learning where they had come from. The wonders of the sky held a special fascination for me and if I knew then that my work as an adult would have me building satellites and rockets that travelled far above the earth and studied the sky and the land below, how happy I would have been!

In the heavens I see your eyes,
In your eyes I see the heavens.

Why look for another Moon or another Sun? — What I see will always be enough for me.

[T]his 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.

The history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.