We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without b… - Carl Sagan

Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows.
In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections.

Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows.

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects.

The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps [of an oscillating universe]. If the universe has already gone through many oscillations, many possible laws of gravity would have been so weak that, for any given initial expansion, the universe would not have held together. Once the universe stumbles upon such a gravitational law, it flies apart and has no further opportunity to experience another oscillation and another cusp and another set of laws of nature. Thus we can deduce from the fact that the universe exists either a finite age, or a severe restriction on the kinds of laws of nature permitted in each oscillation. If the laws of physics are not randomly reshuffled at the cusps, there must be a regularity, a set of rules, that determines which laws are permissible and which are not. Such a set of rules would comprise a new physics standing over the existing physics. Our language is impoverished; there seems to be no suitable name for such a new physics. Both 'paraphysics' and 'metaphysics' have been preempted by other rather different and, quite possibly, wholly irrelevant activities. Perhaps 'transphysics' would do.