Matter Quotes

“To hear never-heard sounds,
To see never-seen colors and shapes,
To try to understand the imperceptible
Power pervading the world;
To fly and find pure ethereal substances
That are not of matter
But of that invisible soul pervading reality.
To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul;
To be a lantern in the darkness
Or an umbrella in a stormy day;
To feel much more than know.
To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain;
To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon;
To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves;
To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets
Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching.
To be a smile on the face of a woman
And shine in her memory
As a moment saved without planning.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
― Erwin Schrödinger

“CIRCLES OF LIFE

Everything
Turns,
Rotates,
Spins,
Circles,
Loops,
Pulsates,
Resonates,
And
Repeats.

Circles
Of life,
Born from
Pulses
Of light,
Vibrate
To
Breathe,
While
Spiraling
Outwards
For
Infinity
Through
The lens
Of time,
And into
A sea
Of stars
And
Lucid
Dreams.

Poetry by Suzy Kassem”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“When we step outside ourselves and stop being merely subjective witnesses, we can recognize how the relentless cut and thrust of our own self-righteousness vanishes and new ground is broken for a state of independent thinking, where ”others” do matter. ("Wheeling and dealing.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The people that mind don't matter, and the people that matter don't mind.”
― -Dr. Seuss

“Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot – "Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That’s the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we’re here. No buffalo knows it’s a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we’re members of Homo sapiens, and it’s the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.

It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.”
― Daniel C. Dennett

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe

“Some people say, ‘Do not judge the book by its cover!’ Well, I say not to judge at all. People can say anything they want to say, but for me, cover does matter.”
― Toba Beta

“The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?

Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“There can be no centre
in infinity.”
― Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

“The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.”
― Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds

“No matter how dark and hopeless a situation may seem, always hold on and never give up your dream.”
― Mouloud Benzadi مولود بن زادي

“Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe

“Please, Katsa," he finally said. "At least talk to me".
She swung around to face him. "What it there to talk about? You know how I feel, and what I think about it."
"And what I feel? Doesn't it matter?”
― Kristin Cashore, Graceling

“Body and soul can never be married

I need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this incongruity which has committed me to hell”
― Sarah Kane

“The less you know, the more you will be known
The less you want, the more you will have
The less you are, the more you will be”
― Vivian Amis, I AM: The Key to Manifesting

“I was transformed the day
My ego shattered,
And all the superficial, material
Things that mattered
To me before,
Suddenly ceased
To matter.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“What does the body matter if the soul is dead?”
― Francine Rivers, An Echo in the Darkness

“What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.”
― STEPHANE AUDEGUY, The Theory of Clouds

“there is no dead matter," he taught us, "lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless.”
― Bruno Schulz

“While getting lost in all those little things that seem so important, don't forget the little things that matter...”
― Virginia Alison

“Even today, more than eighty years after Oort's bold guess, we still don't have a clue what this dark matter is made of. We know it exists. We know where it is. We have maps of its presence within and around galaxies throughout the universe. We even have stringent constraints on what it is not, but we have no clue what it is. And yes, its presence is overwhelming: for every one kilogram of ordinary matter made out of neutrons and protons and electrons, there are five kilograms of dark matter, made out of who-knows-what.”
― Christophe Galfard, The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond

“But as this fugitive sunlight
Arrested & fixed
And with the primal atoms mixed
Is plant & man & rock
So a fleeing thought
Taken up in act & wrought
Makes the air & the sun
And hurls new systems out to run”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations

“This is what makes the subatomic world unique. It possesses not just physical qualities, but also energetic qualities. In truth, matter on a subatomic level exists as a momentary phenomenon. It’s so elusive that it constantly appears and disappears, appearing into three dimensions—in time and space—and disappearing into nothing—into the quantum field, in no space, no time— transforming from particle (matter) to wave (energy), and vice versa. But where do particles go when they vanish into thin air? [...]

Quantum experiments demonstrated that electrons exist simultaneously in an infiniite array of possibilities or probabilities in an invisible field of energy. But only when an observer focuses attention on any location of any one electron does that electron appear. In other words, a particle cannot manifest in reality—that is, ordinary space-time as we know it—until we observe it.

Quantum physics calls this phenomenon “collapse of the wave function” or the “observer effect.” We now know that the moment the observer looks for an electron, there is a specific point in time and space when all probabilities of the electron collapse into a physical event. With this discovery, mind and matter can no longer be considered separate; they are intrinsically related, because subjective mind produces measurable changes on the objective, physical world. [...]

If your mind can influence the appearance of an electron, then theoretically it can influence the appearance of any possibility. [...]

How would your life change if you learned to direct the observer effect and to collapse infinite waves of probability into the reality that you choose? Could you
get better at observing the life you want?”
― Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One