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“If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?”
― Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

“One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“...all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangibleâ€�”
― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

“How do you say, 'Do things for me without me asking you to' since in saying that, you are asking them?”
― Joshua Edward Smith, Duality

“You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms....I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan

“Though I felt dissatisfied, at least I felt like somebody, a person, rather than a thing exemplifying the second law of thermodynamics (all order tends toward entropy, decay, etc.).”
― Paul Kalanithi

“Keeping things stable takes energy. I guess it's a little counter-intuitive, since you think of Newton's first law: a body at rest will stay at rest. But the reality is different. Think about an old water tank you find in the woods. It's sitting there, doing nothing, and yet it's slowly falling apart. Eventually the rust eats away at it beyond a certain threshold, and it collapses under its own weight.”
― Joshua Edward Smith, Entropy

“A marriage takes work. You have to constantly put energy into it to keep it from falling apart. Going nowhere takes energy. Stability isn't what you get when you do nothing. It's what you can hope to achieve when you work hard.”
― Joshua Edward Smith, Entropy

“Things inexorably get worse.”
― Brian Cox

“There is no logical necessity for the existence of a unique direction of total time; whether there is only one time direction, or whether time directions alternate, depends on the shape of the entropy curve plotted by the universe.”
― Hans Reichenbach, The Direction of Time

“Because to exist meant making copies and copies of your own DNA with less and less accuracy with time, to lose the spring in your skin, to inhale a poisonous gas that both allowed your next breath and exploded you from the inside at an insidiously slow pace. To exist was to give way to entropy. To live, in no uncertain terms, was to die.”
― Leo X. Robertson, Jesus of Scumburg

“The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world' s variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted. It is with respect to the dramatic blurring produced by our interactions with the world, caused by the small set of macroscopic variables in terms of which we describe the world, that the entropy of the universe was low.”
― Carlo Rovelli

“Lisa cried until there was nothing left to cry about.”
― Joshua Edward Smith, Entropy

“According to Lamarck, there was a force—the ‘power of life’—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organisation, and maximise chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organise chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility â€� but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. Even the elephant cannot violate the law of thermodynamics â€� although its trunk, surely, must rank as one of the most peculiar means of moving matter using energy.”
― Siddhartha Mukhergee

“Any incremental increase in the siphoning of resources, without productive deployment, is likely to enhance due fragmentation of the resource with a higher and ir-repairable increase in entropy.”
― Priyavrat Thareja

“A.N. Kolmogorov and Yasha Sinai had worked out some illuminating mathematics for the way a system's "entropy per unit time" applies to the geometric pictures of surfaces stretching and folding in phase space. The conceptual core of the technique was a matter of drawing some arbitrarily small box around some set of initial conditions, as one might draw a small square on the side of a balloon, then calculating the effect of various expressions or twists on the box. It might stretch in one direction, for example, while remaining narrow in the other. The change in area corresponded to an introduction of uncertainty about the system's past, a gain or loss of information.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“The universe is full of fuel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. â€� if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
― Arthur Stanley Eddington, New Pathways in Science

“Entropy is just a fancy way of saying: things fall apart.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“Was he becoming paranoid?
No. At least not when compared to Skeeter Washington, who, admiring the stars one evening on the deck of Poe's boat, was heard to say, "If the universe be expanding, they gotta be something chasing it.”
― Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

“Aeonist teachings say that no race is clean of such ignorance or violence. When faced with the threat of such things, we should strive as the gods do to prevent them or put them off. But when faced with such things already past, we should recall the vastness of time, and know that even our worst pains are trivial at such a scale.â€� His mouth twisted. “Does that help?â€� I shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes I can’t help seeing our resistance and kindness, even the godsâ€� own efforts to hold back entropy, as trivial too. No one denies it, but we need the gods, and the kindness, to matter more anyway.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“A sieve is a thing with holes in. Nearly everything has holes in, eventually.”
― Michael Rosen, Uncle Gobb and the Green Heads

“Those are the spirits of the reptoids. All their dreams are dissipating. A million years of culture, civilization, and history are vanishing.”
― A.Z. Banda, Reptoid Universe

“The chaos is all around us, and it grows. It can be very overwhelming. It can deaden your senses to what's important. But if we impart order on that chaos, everything changes. You can find peace.”
― Joshua Edward Smith, Entropy

“The weeds are like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They move in anywhere systems break down. After this disaster the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive. . . . ' ¶ 'More weeds,' Vera concluded.”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus

“TEORIA DELL'ENTROPIA:
ci vuole meno energia per togliere un oggetto dal suo posto che per rimettercelo.”
― Alex Astrid, Vuoi conoscere un casino?

“Stars flicker, flash, and fade like we do. They are born and torn apart by entropy, yet we once called them gods. Foolish is it not? Without knowing, we had called the most permanent concept of a being—stars.”
― H.S. Crow

“When things don't change any longer, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less balance there is - and the more life.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven