Astronaut Quotes

I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door. ~ David Mackay

I've been researching it. I listed to an interview with an actual astronaut on the radio. He said that when he was young and made up his mind that he wanted to go to space, the first thing he did was to figure out all the small steps he would need to take to get there. Because lots of small steps, if they're good ones, can take you a long way if you're heading in the right direction. What most people don't do, this astronaut said, was to even take that first step – or if they do, they fail to plan the complete route to where they really want to be. Most people, he said, just stagger through life, one random step in one random direction at a time. But I've done it. I know what I want and how to get there. Now I just need to do it.
Pg 278 ~ James T. Guthrie

I actually wanted to be an astronaut, but I don't have a mathematical brain. ~ Eva Amurri

I was 8 when we landed on the moon. I was so into the space program as a kid. Eventually, I realized it was very unlikely that a Mexican kid in the early '70s was going to be an astronaut. ~ Alfonso Cuaron

Astronauts are the only kind of celebrity I know who can have a line of people waiting for their autograph, even if the line of people does not know in advance the astronaut's name. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

While I'm not a celebrity, it's such a weird concept that society has cooked up for us. Astronauts and teachers are much more amazing than actors. ~ Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Well, the coolest thing I have seen so far, in terms of, like, me being an astronaut and seeing something unusual, was the rendezvous, the docking of a Progress spaceship. ~ Kevin A. Ford

Is that what depression is about-the sinking feeling that your connection to God is broken and you are left to float on your own in a liquid black space, like an astronaut who has been cut loose from his spaceship and all that linked him to Earth? ~ Elif Shafak

As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water. ~ Brian Skerry

And in that moment, I was hit with the realization that this delicate layer of atmosphere is all that protects every living thing on Earth from perishing in the harshness of space. ~ Ron Garan

I think doing something of your life is something that you've got deep inside, whether it's to, whether you want to be an astronaut or a, whether you want to do science, or whether you want to be a movie star, or whatever. ~ Philippe Perrin

When I'm a man, I will be an astronaut, and find Peter Pan on the second star on the right. ~ Kate Bush

The astronaut in his technical and complex machine, effortlessly orbiting the earth, alone and weightless in the emptiness of space, is the perfect symbol of man today. Despite our domination of the forces of nature and our highly developed technology, we have come to feel ourselves as empty, alienated, anxious, and lonely, without any real inner purpose or meaning to our existence. ~ Stephen Batchelor

An astronaut is someone who's able to make good decisions quickly, with incomplete information, when the consequences really matter. I didn't miraculously become one either, after just eight days in space. But I did get in touch with the fact that I didn't even know what I didn't know. ~ Chris Hadfield

Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony. ~ Buzz Aldrin

I looked and looked but I didn't see God.
[Speaking about, in 1961, becoming the first human to enter space.] ~ Yuri Gagarin

We have overcome the notion that mathematical truths have an existence independent and apart from our own minds. It is even strange to us that such a notion could ever have existed. ~ James Newman

You've got to believe you can be a standup before you can be a standup. You have to believe you can act before you can act. You have to believe you can be an astronaut before you can be an astronaut. You've got to believe. ~ Eddie Izzard

Dogbert: So, Since Columbus is dead, you have no evidence that the earth is round. Dilbert: Look. You can Ask Senator John Glenn. He orbited the earth when he was an astronaut. Dogbert: So, your theory depends on the honesty of politicians. Dilbert: Yes ... no, wait ... ~ Scott Adams

I never made a career decision based solely on my desire to be an astronaut. I attended the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a Navy pilot. I majored in math because math had always come pretty easily to me and I liked it. ~ John L. Phillips

That's how I approach just about everything. I spend my life getting ready to play "Rocket Man." I picture the most demanding challenge; I visualize what I would need to know how to do to meet it; then I practice until I reach a level of competence where I'm comfortable that I'll be able to perform. It's what I've always done, ever since I decided I wanted to be an astronaut in 1969, and that conscious, methodical approach to preparation is the main reason I got to Houston. I never stopped getting ready. Just in case. ~ Chris Hadfield

When I was a kid, they'd say, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" kids would go Wonder Woman, an astronaut. Do you know what I always said? World domination - so we're on our way. ~ Terri Irwin

She has a body for years, and I have an astronaut tan. When we make love it will be like (x + 2)(2x -1) = 0, solve for x. ~ Jarod Kintz

Every astronaut flew into space for a living. But while NASA has not solved the security problems, I would not put me back into a shuttle - and no other astronaut. The confidence is shaken. ~ Ulrich Walter

On a sunny Tuesday - for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday - six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars. ~ Neal Shusterman

Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it. ~ Sylvia Earle

Like a picture out of focus, I'm starting to think that I don't even know who I am anymore. And that feeling – like being sucked out into the vacuum of space without a suit – is the most terrifying of all. ~ Brian McBride

It so happened that my goals kind of matched my career progression toward becoming an astronaut. ~ John L. Phillips

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I grew up in Houston. Gordo Cooper was my favorite astronaut. ~ Dennis Quaid

I had always been interested in the space program, and I didn't know if I could be an astronaut like I'd dreamt about when I was a little kid - to me it sounded kind of silly, someone grow up to be an astronaut - but, when I was in my 20s, I thought maybe I can get a job with NASA or a contractor, do something with the space program. ~ Michael J. Massimino

I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I'm in a world of my own. ~ Muhammad Ali

Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration: ~ Mary Roach

Cowgirl is a spirit, a special brand of courage. The cowgirl faces life head on, lives by her own lights, and makes no excuses. Cowgirls take stands. They speak up. They defend the things they hold dear. A cowgirl might be a rancher, or a barrel racer, or a bull rider, or an actress. But she's just as likely to be a checker at the local Winn Dixie, a full-time mother, a banker, an attorney, or an astronaut. ~ Dale Evans

The Doctor: Doctor Song, you've got that face on again.
River: What face?
The Doctor: The "He's hot when he's clever" face.
River: This is my normal face.
The Doctor: Yes it is.
River: Oh, shut up.
The Doctor: Not a chance. ~ Steven Moffat

It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying. ~ Debora Spar

You need to identify the steps at which contamination can occur - those are the critical control points. You take steps to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you monitor and evaluate and test to make sure that your system is working properly. And if it's done diligently and done faithfully and monitored carefully, then they're producing safe food. And no astronaut of which I'm aware has ever gotten food poisoning in outer space. ~ Marion Nestle

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president. ~ Rachel Corrie

The clothes are different: pre-dog, I used to be very finicky and self-conscious about how I looked; now I schlep around in the worst clothing - big heavy boots, baggy old sweaters, a hooded down parka from L.L. Bean that makes me look like an astronaut. ~ Caroline Knapp

By my mid-30s, I just thought, 'This is not going to happen. I am never going to become an astronaut in the U.K.' ~ David Mackay

Life as an astronaut in space is a very interesting one. There are things we all take for granted here on earth, like gravity, that can make things a bit challenging. One of the fun things about getting here is the zero gravity and floating around. But it also makes things very difficult. ~ Kevin A. Ford

It's okay. I'm a rhinoceros astronaut. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I am also planning to leave a lot of things undone. Part of life's mystery depends on future possibilities, and mystery is an elusive quality which evaporates when sampled frequently, to be followed by boredom. For example, catching various types of fish is on my list of good things to do, but I would be reluctant to rush into it, even if i had the time. I want no part of destroying fishing as a mysterious sport. ~ Michael Collins

Open collaboration encourages greater accountability, which in turn fosters trust. ~ Ron Garan

Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: 'Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.' Explain your emotion. ~ Walker Percy

Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't ~ Wernher Von Braun

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human
being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity. ~ Terence McKenna

So much goes into doing a transplant operation. All the way from preparing the patient, to procuring the donor. It's like being an astronaut. The astronaut gets all the credit, he gets the trip to the moon, but he had nothing to do with the creation of the rocket, or navigating the ship. He's the privileged one who gets to drive to the moon. I feel that way in some of these more difficult operations, like the heart transplant. ~ Denton Cooley

I'm not making light of prayers here, but of so-called school prayer, which bears as much resemblance to real spiritual experienceas that freeze-dried astronaut food bears to a nice standing rib roast. From what I remember of praying in school, it was almost an insult to God, a rote exercise in moving your mouth while daydreaming or checking out the cutest boy in the seventh grade that was a far, far cry from soul-searching. ~ Anna Quindlen

I saw sunrises fade and burn among fleets of sparks. The moon blossomed
like a lily carved of bone ...
The Death of the Astronaut, page 390. ~ Lewis Turco

If I get back to Earth, I'll be famous, right? A fearless astronaut who beat all the odds, right? I bet women like that. More motivation to stay alive. ~ Andy Weir

I saw this movie 'The Right Stuff' when I was in college, and it really rekindled my interest in being an astronaut. I started taking those steps, and then I realized it would be the chance of a lifetime. It would be a dream life: not just a job, but the whole life. ~ Michael J. Massimino

I never want to be known. I'd rather be alone than have everyone talk about me and bother about my life. That's why I want to be an astronaut. I just want to travel into space and stay there. Be somewhere where no one else goes. ~ Aimee Herman

!!UK !! ALL INDIA 009694722340 USA love black magic specialist molvi ji uk all india ~ Astrid Amara

No, I think most astronauts recognize that the space shuttle program is very high-risk, and are prepared for accidents. ~ Sally Ride

He had the face of a floating astronaut who had lost his tether and had only one chance to grab a lifeline or forever drift away into endless black. I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. ~ Lissa Price

A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space. ~ Bill Gaede

Audiences of critical thinkers are my favorite kinds of audiences. There are jokes I tell in the show that don't get laughs unless I am in front of an audience of critical thinkers. Put me in front of a crowd of science teachers or astronauts! The guileless aren't our audience - it's the critical thinkers we love. ~ Adam Savage

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. ~ Ben Lerner

I went to school at night in L.A. to brush up on my engineering while I applied to the astronaut program. I really did not know if I would get in. It was the year after the Challenger accident in 1987. ~ Mae Jemison

From the Moon's surface, the Earth is but a tiny, blue teardrop in the inky blackness of space. ~ Stewart Stafford

Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things. ~ Robert Galbraith

Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut. ~ Drew Van Acker

And people are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut. Or they can have pictures of really big numbers. Or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they're trying to work something out.

And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that it has pins sticking out of its leg and chases after the cat. But when a person has an operation it has a picture in its head of the hurt carrying on for months and months. ~ Mark Haddon

There was a small window when I wanted to be an astronaut. It may have coincided with not getting cast in a high school play. ~ Patrick J. Adams

I don't believe the sickest people that I meet throughout my day at work are in the business of having outlandish desires, either. I don't think they are staring at the square-tiled ceiling of the intensive-care unit and dreaming of being an astronaut or an explorer. I don't think they're holding the hand of their wife and thinking, "I hope we win the lottery and become rich." Perhaps I am wrong, but I think they are, for the most part, simply hoping they will get to be a part of life again. They are hoping for all the things we take for granted every day: the ability to breathe by yourself, to get out of bed, to sit on a toilet or lie in a bath. To swallow your food and choose what you want for breakfast. To walk out into the world and appreciate all its beauty, or complain about the weather - but to have that choice. ~ Aoife Abbey

On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president. ~ Dee Dee Myers

The way I see myself, is like I'm this Martian flower. A flower on Mars, doing my own thing; this is my own planet, don't get too near me. And maybe an astronaut will come around one day, and say, "Hey, this is a cool planet, that's a cool flower, maybe I can stay here." You know? So far, the astronauts that visit, say, "Hey this is a cool planet and that's a cool flower, I wonder what happens if I pick this flower, bring it home and teach it how to grow in my backyard soil." I'm a Martian flower. I have my own planet, my own soil, I don't need to be anything other. It's a pretty great planet, but you have to have Mars in your heart to stay here. You need to turn Martian. Martian flowers don't grow in your backyard. ~ C. JoyBell C.

When we were five, they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Our answers were thing like astronaut, president, or in my case ... princess.
When we were ten, they asked again and we answered - rock star, cowboy, or in my case, gold medalist. But now that we've grown up, they want a serious answer. Well, how 'bout this: who the hell knows?!
This isn't the time to make hard and fast decisions, its time to make mistakes. Take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere chill. Fall in love - a lot. Major in philosophy 'cause there's no way to make a career out of that. Change your mind. Then change it again, because nothing is permanent.
So make as many mistakes as you can. That way, someday, when they ask again what we want to be ... we won't have to guess. We'll know.
[from the movie] ~ Stephenie Meyer

No matter how competent or how seasoned, every astronaut is essentially a perpetual student, forever cramming for the next test. It's not how I envisioned things when I was 9 years old. Then I dreamed of blasting off in a blaze of glory to explore the universe, not sitting in a classroom studying orbital mechanics. In Russian. ~ Chris Hadfield

I do not know your woes, Humans, but I do know that they are abundant. Believe in each other, and stand together, and you will conquer them all. ~ Paul The Astronaut

Whilst my mother couldn't give me access to the world, she at least made sure to let me know it existed.

A kid cannot dream of being an astronaut if he does not know about space. ~ Trevor Noah

He addressed the class ... in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock. ~ Michael Chabon

Well before I was in a band, I wanted to be everything from a vet, an astronaut, an archeologist was a big one. It could be very wide-ranging because I had a lot of different interests including music so I'm very happy where I wound up. ~ Joan Jett

He was an astronaut without a suit, but he was still breathing. ~ John Corey Whaley

The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class - my class had 29 men and 6 women - those men were all very used to working with women. ~ Sally Ride

At no time, when the astronauts were in space were they alone, there was a constant surveillance by UFOs. ~ Scott Carpenter

I think there would be no shortage of applicants to the government astronaut corps to be settlers on the planet Mars. And I think this would be very inspiring. ~ Buzz Aldrin

I wanted to make sure that the man who found the genie would not take terrible advantage of her, so he needed to be a person of integrity and honor - which is why I made the male lead an astronaut. The rest, as they say, is history. ~ Sidney Sheldon

Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman. ~ Trent Reznor

If we adopt the same collaborative mindset and practices that got to the moon and back, and that built the International Space Station, we can alleviate poverty - and do much more. ~ Ron Garan

One thing I probably share with everyone else in the astronaut office is composure. ~ Sally Ride

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 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

As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes. ~ Chris Hadfield

There's a lot of things I nerd out over. Quantum Mechanics. I also love Dungeons and Dragons. I want to be an astronaut. ~ Analeigh Tipton

I'm just a big boy, I'm still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid. ~ Bryan Cranston

I'd love to be an astronaut. I bet you get a better understanding of our planet seeing it from a distance. ~ Tony DiTerlizzi

I don't know any astronauts. There are a lot of people who say they want to be comedians. ~ Todd Barry

But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music - they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can't listen to because they've been "ruined" by bad words - my own and others. In Beyonce's song "Irreplaceable," she rhymes "minute" with "minute," and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I'm singing along). On my own song "Astronaut," I wrap up with the line "feel like I'm an astronaut," which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh. ~ David Byrne

I think professional cosmonaut trainer in fact said that we are the only two [with Damian Kulash ] he found fit to be astronauts, which is ridiculous because we are far from fit from being astronauts. So you can imagine what was going on up there. ~ Trish Sie

'Love' has that Kubrick tonality to it, but this is not a Stanley Kubrick movie - there will never be another. At the same time, 'Love' has a modern feel. For example: In one scene, these astronauts go through a wormhole sequence, and you feel like you're being slapped around inside your head by a sonic boom. ~ Tom DeLonge

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have - like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut - they have got there and named "opportunity" in a way that we cannot get ownership of now. ~ Amartya Sen

Ben Affleck (who plays A.J. Frost) and I got to actually go into the neutral buoyancy tank in actual $10 million spacesuits the astronauts wear in outer space, and that was pretty interesting ~ Bruce Willis

Everyone I have spoken with about working with the Russians in space exploration believes that the United States has learned a great deal from Russia and that Russia has learned a great deal from the United States – and that the entire international space partnership is much better because of it. ~ Ron Garan

The successful golfers - they're like astronauts or pilots. They have that demeanor that they can focus and stay within that one moment and nothing distracts them. That's not me. ~ Ray Romano

"What's the next thing that's going to kill me?" is a mantra for pilots and astronauts. ~ Chris Hadfield

And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight. ~ Umberto Guidoni

Then there was the challenge to keep doing better and better, to fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown. That led to my being recognized as one of the more experienced test pilots, and that led to the astronaut business. ~ Alan Shepard

I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts. ~ Philippe Perrin

To be one of the world's top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn't have much carry-over. ~ Chris Hadfield

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut. ~ Geoffrey S. Fletcher