Lisa Stefany > Lisa's Quotes

“... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

“The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”
― Paul Tillich

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.”
― Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty

“Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.”
― Jules Renard

“Without awareness, we are not truly alive.”
― James F. T. Bugental

“When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.”
― Rollo May, Existence

“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.”
― Tom Stoppard

“Life’s easy.

It’s living it that’s difficult.”
― Mike Sasso

“The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable”
― Albert Camus

“Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.”
― Bill Bryson

“Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. 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.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“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.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“Time passed quickly. Constant did not move.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan