Until the End of Time Quotes

“all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?17”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Entropy can decrease. It’s just ridiculously unlikely.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Deeply. As we have seen, humans prevailed in no small part because our species has the capacity to pool brain and brawn, to live and work in groups, to divvy up responsibilities and effectively meet the needs of the collective. The greater social cohesion of those in a religiously bound group would have made them a more formidable force in the ancestral world, and according to this line of argument, securing an adaptive role for religious affiliation.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“To survive is to kindle the search for why survival matters. Technicians inevitably become philosophers. Or scientists. Or theologians. Or writers. Or composers. Or musicians. Or artists. Or poets. Or devotees of thousands of variations and combinations of systems of thought and creative expression that promise insight into the very questions that gnaw at our insides long after our stomachs are full.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Impermanence underlies experience.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“When the brain’s penchant for simplified schematic representations is applied to itself, to its own attention, the resulting description ignores the very physical processes responsible for that attention. That is why thoughts and sensations seem ethereal, as if they come from nowhere, as if they hover in our heads. If your schematic representation of your body were to leave out your arms, the motion of your hands would seem ethereal too.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Dutifully following the second law, we conclude that today’s state derives from yesterday’s even lower entropy state. And that state, we envision, derives from the day-before-yesterday’s still lower entropy state, and so on, yielding a trail of ever-decreasing entropy taking us ever farther back in time until we finally reach the big bang.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Messy arrangements far outweigh orderly ones.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Eternity is always presented to us as an idea that we can’t grasp, as something enormous, enormous! Why does it have to be enormous? All of a sudden, instead of all that, imagine there’ll be a little room, something like a country bathhouse, sooty, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity. You know, I sometimes imagine it like that.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“But a proper exegesis of the second law renders an intelligent designer unnecessary. As surprising as it is remarkable, regions containing concentrated energy and order (stars being the archetypal example) are a natural consequence of the universe diligently toeing the second law’s line and becoming ever more disordered. Indeed, such pockets of order prove to be catalysts that facilitate the universe, over the long run, to reach its entropic potential. Along the way, and as part of this entropic progression, they also facilitate the emergence of life.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Note too that while professional philosophers are paid to scrutinize belief - to reveal hidden assumptions and bring attention to faulty inferences - that's not how most of us now, or our ancestors then, go about it. Many beliefs in most lives go unexamined.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“How did the universe begin? What is the nature of time? Is space what it appears to be? If you absorb science’s most refined answers to such big questions, your perspective on reality will almost certainly shift. That we are a minor planet orbiting an average star formed in the aftermath of a stupendous swelling of primordial space is a realization that constantly informs my thoughts regarding how we fit into the grand picture. That time elapses at a different rate for me than it does for anyone else who is not moving precisely with me is a stunning fact that I reflect on endlessly.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“The questions we ask determine the stories that provide the most useful answers.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water. Life could leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin, a bag in which to take the water with it.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, do not fixate on the end.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“discovery relied on imagining a simple but fundamental rearrangement of the Lego pieces of reality, an inversion of symbolic patterns so familiar that most minds glided over the possibility entirely.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Wittgenstein’s summary, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“without intent or design, without forethought or judgment, without planning or deliberation, the cosmos yields meticulously ordered configurations of particles from atoms to stars to life.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Life could leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin, a bag in which to take the water with it.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Deep mysteries call for clarity delivered through a collection of nested stories. Whether reductionist or emergent, whether mathematical or figurative, whether scientific or poetic, we piece together the richest understanding by approaching questions from a range of different perspectives.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“I was suddenly sure I wanted to be part of a journey toward insights so fundamental that they would never change. Let governments rise and fall, let World Series be won and lost, let legends of film, television, and stage come and go. I wanted to spend my life catching a glimpse of something transcendent.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“I think I thought, therefore I think I was.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“As the amount of matter used to create a black hole increases, the required density to which that matter must be crushed decreases.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“The examined life examines death.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“The lyricist Yip Harburg, author of many classics including “Over the Rainbow,” said it simply: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”22 Feel a thought. For me, that captures the essence of artistic truth.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“By embracing the nearly ludicrous suggestion that a gloppy grey knot of neurons has consciousness, you’ve already taken the big step.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Not only is mind our tether to reality, perhaps it is our tether to eternity.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“To date, laboratory attempts to recreate these processes are intriguing but inconclusive. We have yet to create life from scratch. I have little doubt that one day, perhaps not far off, we will.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“To date, laboratory attempts to recreate these processes are intriguing but inconclusive. We have yet to create life from scratch.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe