These Milky Way quotes will inspire you. The Milky Way is the galaxy that comprises our solar system, with a name describing the galaxy’s appearance from Earth; a hazy band of light seen in the night sky made up of stars that are individually indistinguishable to the naked eye.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Milky Way quotes, Milky Way sayings, and Milky Way proverbs.
Famous Milky Way Quotes
- “The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.” ~ Galileo Galilei
- “A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way” ~ Carl Sagan
- “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Ecstatic Love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it.” ~ Rumi
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“We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.” ~ John Muir
- “For many years I have been a night watchman of the Milky Way galaxy.” ~ Bart Bok
- “A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.” ~ David Eagleman
- “The spiral in a snail’s shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It’s the same ratio that you’ll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.” ~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- “You keep worrying you’re taking up too much space. I wish you’d let yourself be the milky way.” ~ Andrea Gibson
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“To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river, – the River of Heaven, – the Silver Stream.” ~ Lafcadio Hearn
- “The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.” ~ Evelyn Underhill
- “There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.” ~ Buzz Aldrin
- “The Milky Way swooped diagonally across the heavens, reminding me of my utter insignificance, and at the same time my complete interconnection with everything. I was just a tiny speck of consciousness, and yet I was consciousness itself.” ~ Roz Savage
- “When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time.” “The idea is much too big for my little head.” “The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.” ~ Jostein Gaarder
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“Any individual is greater than the Milky Way.” ~ Nelson Rodrigues
- “Out Milky Way is the dwelling; the nebulae are the city.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.” ~ Rebecca Solnit
- “We are not at the center of ourselves, but instead – like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe – far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring.” ~ David Eagleman
- “If you want to see a black hole tonight, tonight just look in the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation. That’s the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and there’s a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together.” ~ Michio Kaku
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“All the normal matter in the Milky Way disc is denser than the dark matter that surrounds it.” ~ Lisa Randall
- “I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them.” ~ Johann Heinrich Lambert
- “Maybe dark matter is denser than we usually assume, kind of like the Milky Way plane.” ~ Lisa Randall
- “If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.” ~ Henri Poincare
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“…this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways is-nothing.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become. But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- “I’m helping launch the new Milky Way Chocolate Ice Cream Bar. I play an astrophysicist on television, and the name of the bar is Milky Way, so put two and two together, and here I am.” ~ Kunal Nayyar
- “Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretch’d in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” ~ William Wordsworth
- “I’ll not always be here on guard. The stars twinkle in the Milky Way and the wind sighs for songs across the empty fields of a planet a Galaxy away. You won’t always be here. But before you go, whisper this to your sons and their sons – “The work was free. Keep it so.” ~ L. Ron Hubbard
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“As, pricked out with less and greater lights, between the poles of the universe, the Milky Way so gleameth white as to set very sages questioning.” ~ Dante Alighieri
- “There is a point of view among astronomical researchers that is generally referred to as the Principle of Mediocrity. … If the Sun and its retinue of worlds is only one system among many, then many other systems will be like ours: home to life. Indeed, to the extent that this is true, we should be prepared for the possibility that, even in the Milky Way galaxy, billions of planets may be carpeted by the dirty, nasty business known as life.” ~ Seth Shostak
- “It may seem rash indeed to draw conclusions valid for the whole universe from what we can see from the small corner to which we are confined. Who knows that the whole visible universe is not like a drop of water at the surface of the earth? Inhabitants of that drop of water, as small relative to it as we are relative to the Milky Way, could not possibly imagine that beside the drop of water there might be a piece of iron or a living tissue, in which the properties of matter are entirely different.” ~ Emile Borel
- “Lo! the poor Indian! whose untutor’d mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way.” ~ Alexander Pope - “We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite… Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space.” ~ Immanuel Kant
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“And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in in a thousand ways, and the Night, and the trail of the Milky Way to wonder at.” ~ Williston Fish
- “Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?” ~ Julian Barnes , Milky Way quotes love
- “At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn’t get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I’ve never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I’d want to feel the stars round my head. I’d want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I’d want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That’s how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.” ~ Jeanette Winterson
- “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.” ~ Carl Sagan , Milky Way quotes galaxy
- “While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it’s worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system, but the solar system is not in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is not in the center of the universe, and it may come to pass that our universe is just one of many that comprise a multiverse. And in case you’re one of those people who thinks that the edge may be a special place, we are not at the edge of anything either.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.” ~ Alexander Pope
- “In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “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?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “I felt as if the Milky Way, hovering above our heads like a celestial pitcher, had suddenly overturned, pouring suns and planets down my throat. Stars seemed to be shooting out of my finger and toes, the ends of my hair.” ~ Meg Cabot
- “A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, And pavement stars,–as stars to thee appear Seen in the galaxy, that milky way Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest Powder’d with stars.” ~ John Milton
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“That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.” ~ Immanuel Kant
- “I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.” ~ Carl Sagan
- “Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be Blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,
Rest and expatiates in a life to come.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor’d mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n,
Behind the cloud-topp’d hill, an humbler heav’n.” ~ Alexander Pope -
“Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.” ~ David Eagleman
- “Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles — and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.” ~ Gary Snyder
- “At noon I feel as though I could devour all the elephants of Hindostan, and then pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg cathedral; in the evening I become so sentimental that I would fain drink up the Milky Way without reflecting how indigestible I should find the little fixed stars, and by night there is the Devil himself broke loose in my head and no mistake.” ~ Heinrich Heine
- “Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley.” ~ Cherie Lunghi
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“It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “The universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we’ve got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it’s one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe – maybe it’s countless other universes.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto’s orbit into a coffee cup; then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America.” ~ Wayne Hays
- “Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I’ll tell them: I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home. … I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your friend was a creep. I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess, ‘I stole this.’ … But most of all I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all.” ~ Erma Bombeck
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“There’s a sort of magic and music to comedy. Some words, some numbers even, are funnier than others. A Caramac bar, for instance, is funnier than a Milky Way.” ~ David Walliams
- “You cannot see the Milky Way in New York City any more … We risk the loss of our sensual perception. And if you lose those, naturally, you try to compensate by other stimulations, by very loud noises, or by bright lights or drugs.” ~ Rene Dubos
- “Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!” ~ Horace Walpole
- “As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing,never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.” ~ Herman Melville
- “Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize ‘The stars are words’ and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.” ~ Jack Kerouac
- “Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed. The Milky Way streams silver through the night. I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams I have no cause to wake or trouble you. And, as they say, the incident is closed. Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. Now you and I are quits. Why bother then To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts. Behold what quiet settles on the world. Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars. In hours like these, one rises to address The ages, history, and all creation.” ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky
The term Milky Way is a translation of Latin via lactea, from the Greek meaning “milky circle.”
