“And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.”

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.

The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.

Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.

And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.

It’s almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.