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some have argued that entropy actually likes the idea of life (and may encourage it to appear in many parts of the universe), because life degrades free energy so much more efficiently than nonlife.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

crustal plates on the surface move around at about the speed that your fingernails grow; the fastest of them cruise at about twenty-five centimeters a year.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

we humans have managed to re-create such energies briefly, in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. And, yes, particles do start popping out of that boiling ocean of energy.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

We don’t know what Goldilocks conditions allowed a universe to emerge, and we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

Stephen Hawking argues that the question of beginnings is just badly put. If the geometry of space-time is spherical, like the surface of Earth but in more dimensions, then asking what existed before the universe is like looking for a starting point on the surface of a tennis ball. That’s not how it works. There is no edge or beginning to time, just as there is no edge to the surface of Earth.

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

Blaise Pascal wrote: “Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.”

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

“What’s the meaning of the universe?” asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. “What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there, that’s it, and your own meaning is that you’re there.”

— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a “God” which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?

— A History of God by Karen Armstrong

A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

— A History of God by Karen Armstrong

My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines.

— A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.

— A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity.

— A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Fans packed the restaurants twenty-four-seven, but the waitstaff didn’t complain—nerds tend to overtip. I’d heard that the casinos were less happy with the level of gambling. Turns out nerds understand probability.

— We Are Legion by Dennis E. Taylor (Bobiverse)

We are influenced by our personality but not controlled by it.

— The 5 Love Languages by Gary D. Chapman (Duplicate)