“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives … But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is... See more

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life

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Perhaps, down here on Earth, we so readily lose perspective because we spend our days on myriad distractions keeping us from feeling the blade of time press against our lives with the urgency of living. Nothing sharpens that blade like seeing the edge between day and night, the beautiful and brutal turning edge, as the planet rotates:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been

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Carl Sagan's birth anniversary. And what better way to remember him than my favourite quote ever, inspired by this picture taken of our planet from a spacecraft 6 billion kilometres away.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever... See more