Quotes About Existence

The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested—probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a cell? Yet it's impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - perhaps even stronger. Life just wants to be.

As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

I suppose—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

It is easy to overlook the thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point.We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with.

energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren können, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.

there are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again—and that these are pushing the universe outwards at an accelerating rate.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here – and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp.

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting—fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist.

It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.

in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The