I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Even Hubble hasn’t found yet the end of this universe, and we don’t know that it has any end.

The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider… the riders contend for its possession.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

I’m not somebody that thinks about destiny and fate, but I don’t walk away from it when something unfolds.

Actions are the seed of fate deeds grow into destiny.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

I believe the destiny of your generation – and your nation – is a rendezvous with excellence.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

By ancestry, I was born to rule.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

Intimates are predestined.

The motions of the comets are exceedingly regular, and they observe the same laws as the motions of the planets, but they differ from the motions of vortices in every particular and are often contrary to them.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

The centre of the system of the world is immovable.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

There could be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.