Quotes About Existence

three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

This is one reason why some experts believe that there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one that we could exist in.

When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.

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 the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on.

At some point in an unimaginably distant past some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.

the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn't quite exist yet.

clearly no thinking presence behind any of the actions of the cells. It all just happens, smoothly and repeatedly and so reliably

two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

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 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.

Resulta un tanto fascinante pensar que si tu mismo te fueses deshaciendo con unas pinzas, átomo a átomo, lo que producirías sería un montón de fino polvo atómico, nada del cual habría estado nunca vivo pero todo él habría sido en otro tiempo tú.

It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.

They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development." But

there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging. From

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.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances 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. And

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's "dark matter"—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But - and here's an interesting point - for the most part it doesn't want to be much.

we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

dark matter," which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky

That a word or phrase hasn't been recorded tells us only that it hasn't been recorded, not that it hasn't existed. The

Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that's 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.

It is a strange, nonintuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors.