“Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology.”
“We needn’t resort to myth to get that spine-chilling thrill of being of being part of something grander than ourselves. Our vast universe provides us with enough profound and beautiful truths to live a spiritually fulfilling life.”
“Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. … My view is that all over the world and across time, these are all a form of art, an elaborate performance or a secret poem, all vital in their ability to help us face the nature of time and change, life and death, and everything else we cannot control.”
“Every single one of us appears seemingly from nowhere and then, eventually, returns to nowhere. We are conceived, we grow, and we die, but what happens beyond that is a great, haunting mystery. We grapple with it by marking how and when things change here on Earth, both cyclically and permanently.”
“An old tradition is not intrinsically better than a new one. Especially when it is such a joy to make new ones up—ones that reflect exactly what you believe, ones that make sense of your life as you experience it, ones that bring the world a little closer to the way you wish it could be.”
“Religion, at its best, facilitates empathic, gratitude, and awe. Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams.”
Spring legends are “about suffering and heartbreak giving way to joy”
Protagoras of Abdera: “Concerning the gods, I have no way of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what they are like in form. There are many things that impede my knowledge, both the obscurity [of the subject] and the brevity of human life.”
“For many, reading passages from their holy text offers daily enlightenment and answers to the endless questions that run through our minds. For us, it was the encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries. Every day I gained a deeper sense of the workings of the world and the universe.”
“Every piece of trivia is a small clue to something else, a glimpse at how we fit into the universe.”
“I already knew that just being alive at all is astonishing and beautiful, but I don’t know if I had ever really felt it fully before. I started telling myself that no matter what tomorrow brought, each little moment on Earth was still meaningful. And that if life went on forever it would not be as precious.”
“Some of the stars we can see at night are already dead. Starlight is a kind of time travel. A vision of the past.”
Yiddish “death day” (yahrzeit) light candles to commemorate deceased; “like a miniature version of dead stars that appear to twinkle even after they’re long gone”
Birthday candles originally a Greek celebration of Artemis as “light bringer” like moon and, subsequently, for birthdays as goddess of birth
“All our best rituals are a kind of performance about what we need or want most.”
“We are powerless over so many of the most thrilling elements of life: the changing of the seasons, sunrises and sunsets, falling in love. These offer us a taste of the grandeur of being alive, a reminder that we are part of nature.”
Message in Rome’s Capuchin Crypt bone rooms: “What you are now we will be; what we are now you will be”
“We pretend [death] rituals are for our dead, but they are for the living, for us.”
“Every loss you withstand in your life reopens all the others. Every goodbye is every goodbye.”
“No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos.”