Entropy Quotes

“The last day has come for our Dardan land. This is the hour which no effort of ours can alter. We Trojans are no more: no more is Ilium;no more the splendour of Teucrian glory. All now belongs to Argos; it is Jupiter's remorseless will.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“Those gods on whom our power hitherto depended have forsaken their altars and their shrines and gone forth from us; the city which you would rescue is already ablaze; and it is for us to plunge amid the spears and die. Nothing can save the conquered but the knowledge that they cannot now be saved.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“If you stand still you fall backwards,
You cannot stand still, because the world moves away from you if you stand still.
And there is no stasis. Only backwards.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value.

This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness.

In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“The universe is driven by a very simple force – symmetry. The universe goes from perfect symmetry to broken symmetry and back to perfect symmetry again. It does this forever. We can put it in other terms: God becomes non-God (alienated from God) and then God again, following an immense, cosmic dialectical process through which he becomes conscious of who and what he is. We are all agents of God’s rediscovery. We are all becoming God.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“Inventions were not like your children. Your children were all your flaws shown to you in a way that made you love them: your worst made good. Inventions were your best attempt at beautiful thought. They were objective; they worked or they did not. They had purpose, whether they achieved it or not. They were yours always, in that they did not leave you, or turn away.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“People here have no imagination. They repeat whatever you say to them.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Melancholy is that a scrambled egg can't be unscrambled--entropy increases--experience is subject to the arrow of time. And the infinite sadness of my life consists in that I only recognize the beauty of simple arrangements from the relative vantage of the scrambled; memory, not experience, is my only access to it. Anxiety is the progression toward equilibrium. Despair is the inescapability. Insanity is the rationalizing of it all. Sanity is the irrational acceptance of it all. Indifference is just detached therapy. And progression--activity / toil / tasks / success / failure--just coping distraction and procrastination, just ill-placed deferment--my preferred route. And crisis--”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“Ontological mathematics is operating in such a way as to organize itself into a zero-entropy structure – mathematical perfection. The “Big Bang” is equivalent to the total scrambling of a cosmic Rubik’s Cube. The task of ontological mathematics is then to unscramble the Cube and return it to its original, pristine configuration. Emotionally, this amounts to returning to perfect Love and Bliss. Intellectually, it means reaching a state of perfect logic and reason … thinking perfectly”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“Love takes its meaning from the mainfold ways in which it is used; which are indefinite in number. You can never understand its menaing fully because you can never experience love in all its context. And so it is energy and entropy.”
― Craig F. Bohren, Atmospheric Thermodynamics

“Death always seems to come for you whether you are machine or organic, entropy seem to always win.

Maybe that's the lesson we all need to learn before it’s too late. Time is precious to us and we need to live and love while we can still do so.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Souls' Inverse

“All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Imagine God as a mirror. The Devil is the shattered mirror, exploded into a myriad of splinters. God as a single mirror is made up of countless individual minds, but they are so harmonized, so integrated, so symmetrical, that they are indistinguishable and constitute a perfect Unity. However, when the perfect mirror breaks, it breaks everywhere, disconnecting every mind from the perfect hive. The perfect mirror has zero entropy. The exploded mirror has maximum entropy. Entropy is the Devil. Entropy is matter. Once the mirror - as a living entity - has broken, it needs to reconstitute itself, like a jigsaw puzzle. It needs to recreate God. That is the goal and meaning of existence.”
― Harry Knox, God Is a Hive Mind: The Cellular Divinity

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

“...La ley natural del universo es la entropía, todo tiende al desorden, a romperse, a dispersarse, la gente se pierde, miren cuántos se perdieron en La Retirada, los sentimientos se destiñen y el olvido se desliza en las vidas como neblina. Se requiere una voluntad heroica para mantener todo en su sitio.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.”
― Peter Drucker

“Project managers don’t write code, they don’t test the use cases, and they’re not designing the interface. You know what a good project manager does? They are chaos-destroying machines, and each new person you bring onto your team, each dependency you create, adds hard-to-measure entropy to your team. A good project manager thrives on measuring, controlling, and crushing entropy. You did this easily when you were a team of five, but if you’re going to succeed at 105, what was done organically now needs to be done mechanically.”
― Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

“Due to entropy, all promises containing the word never inevitably decay and break apart.”
― Yanko Tsvetkov, Apophenia: Myths, Tales and Legends from an Imaginary World

“Everything follows these rules of going towards a lower energy and maximum
randomness except one thing - life!
Life wants to live and become more complex, smarter, Life wants to use the basic elements like air,water and nutrients to grow and
develop.”
― Peter Clifford Nichols, The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager

“Grey lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided in and out among the rocks or lay still and sunned themselves. Where prosperity has reigned, and fallen; where glory has flamed, and gone out; where beauty has dwelt, and passed away; where gladness was, and sorrow is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high places, there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human vanity. His coat is the colour of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came to nought, of loves that are buried. If he could speak, he would say, Build temples: I will lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I will inhabit them; erect empires: I will inherit them; bury your beautiful: I will watch the worms at their work; and you, who stand here and moralise over me: I will crawl over your corpse at the last.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Or, the New Pilgrims' Progress

“Matter (Becoming) is entropic. Pure mind (Being) has zero entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is said to predict the Heat Death of the universe. In fact, this is false. What it actually predicts is the death of matter, space and time – via the expansion of the physical universe until it flatlines and thus ceases to be. Evolution is about eliminating matter, and this is accomplished – exactly – at the end of the universe, in readiness for the creation of the next universe. Only at the end of the universe is Becoming not operating in conjunction with Being. However, as soon as Being reaches exclusivity (Becoming has ceased to exist), the first act of Being is to initiate Becoming again, and this is none other than the Big Bang, the cosmic eruption of Becoming across all monadic nodes, and the origin of the “splitting”of all monadic minds into separate centers of agency.”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“The ultimate cause of matter must be immaterial. The ultimate cause of entropy must be free of entropy. The ultimate cause of time must be outside time. The ultimate cause of space must be outside space. The ultimate cause of temperature must be without temperature. The ultimate cause of physical motion must be without physical motion. Why? Because everything on the left belongs to the temporal and contingent while everything on the right belongs to the eternal and necessary. Only the latter can explain the former. The former cannot explain themselves. The latter belong to the order of eternal truths.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species we will never see again. Growing older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must be taken from the original coal. Earth's excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Indeed, I once did a little exercise: I took about half a dozen economics books, the big fat ones like Samuelson’s, and so on, and looked up in the index: do the words “energy,” “entropy,” or “thermodynamics” ever occur? Not once in any of them. Energy! You can’t even have a f——king dream at night without energy.

[Quoting physicist Geoffrey West.]”
― W. Brian Arthur, Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium

“...the story of the city was always a story of disintegration.”
― Missouri Williams, The Doloriad

“Your hopes and dreams either move in flow with the universe or against it. Infinity is a movement, not a fixed amount. Each universe moves in distinct directions. Our universe moves in three ways. It moves towards lower energy, increasing randomness and towards the propagation of life and consciousness.”
― Peter Clifford Nichols, The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager

“An aneurysm at forty-seven seemed unlikely. But in truth... life is the unlikely outcome. Death? Chaos? Entropy? Much more common.”
― David Bowles

“He asked: “You are aware of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, right?”
“‘You Do Not Talk About Thermodynamics?’” Rudy said nothing. “The currency of the universe, Entropy. Okay and…?”
“A candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”
“That seems unrelated, but I’ll allow it. Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“I like either the lavender or cinnamon-scented ones.”
“This isn’t the advice I was asking for and you know that.”
“Isn’t it? You know, it doesn’t take a master’s in behavioral psychology to see you’ve some unresolved issues.”
“And the universe has a tendency to devolve into chaos, so why bother controlling it, just control myself?”
Rudy just continued to shoot glances at Danny’s arm. Danny kept it face down, pretending not to notice.
“Rudy: Sigmund Freud meets Dr. Seuss. Thank you.”
― Kyle St Germain, Dysfunction

“If adding two numbers produced a random result each time, we could never rely on math. Fortunately there are definite answers with no variation. Similarly, there is nothing random about the study of science. If each iteration of an experiment yielded a different result from the same variables, we would not be able to conclude anything with certainty. The scientific method is not compatible with randomness. If the universe were truly random, the study of science itself would not be possible.

The laws of nature stand in direct opposition to the notion that all is born of chance.”
― J.D. Atkinson, Believable: Discover the God That Saves All

“Keep cool but care.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.