The universe is not a machine, however, but a living process. Time is real, and the future is genuinely open. To suppose otherwise is to mistake the map for the territory, and the clock for the heartbeat it was built to measure.

Samuel Alexander — Space, Time, and Deity

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cosmologyphilosophy-of-timeemergentism

The universe is not made of stories, but of atoms — yet I find myself living inside a story I did not write, governed by rules I did not choose, and dying toward an end I cannot name. This is the human condition, and it is also its dignity.

Erwin Schrödinger — What Is Life?

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existentialismmortalityconsciousness

And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.

Maria Popova

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