The vastness of the universe

I've been reflecting a lot lately about the vastness of the universe.  It's extraordinary, literally beyond comprehension.  It gives me a deep sense of wonder which I find very useful in my spiritual path.  Below I'm going to keep quotes and images on this subject.

• Wonder is the basis of worship. Thomas Carlyle

• To give you an idea of how vast the space is between celestial bodies, consider this: Light traveling at a constant speed of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second takes just over one second to travel between the earth and the moon; light from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach the earth. Light from our nearest neighbor in space, a star called Proxima Centauri, which is the sun that is closest to our own sun, travels for 4.5 years before it reaches the earth. This is how vast the space is that surrounds us. And then there is the intergalactic space, whose vastness defies all comprehension. Light from the galaxy closest to our own, the Andromeda Galaxy, takes 2.4 million years to reach us.  Eckhart Tolle

• The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars. Eckhart Tolle

• If you watched a rock your entire life it would never look different. But if you were God and could observe the rock over fifteen billion years as though only a second had passed, the rock would be frantic with activity. It would be shrinking and growing and trading matter with its environment. Its molecules would travel the universe and become a partner to amazing things that we could never imagine. Scott Adams, God's Debris

• Imagine that the earth, 4.6 billion years old, is a 46 year old women. It has taken the whole of the Earth Women's life for the earth to become what it is today. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. She was 11 when the first single cell organisms appeared. She was 40 when the first animals like worms and jellyfish appeared. She was 45 - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs first roamed the earth. The whole of human civilisation as we know it, began only two hours ago in the Earth Women's life. An awe - inspiring and humbling thought that the whole of contemporary history, the World wars, the man on the moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - is no more than a blink of her eye. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

• Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.  Sir James Jeans