Top 132 Entropy Quotes & Sayings

So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy

Aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

There are foods that accelerate aging and entropy, and others that renew and revitalise the body.

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.

The most basic human impulse is toward entropy and laziness. The less we have to do to grow spiritually, the more likely we are to do it.

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not there if you want to keep writing good code.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.

The organism feeds on negative entropy.

'Entropy' will be a kaleidoscope of thought processes and my identity as an Indian who grew up in California.

One of the main purpose of art has ever been that of making its indispensable contribution to the growth of entropy of the universal stupidity.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

I'm a human entropy producer.

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.

As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.

The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.

If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy is underappreciated as something that has a crucial role in how we go through life.

Instead of focusing on the work, you focus on the entropy and the chaos and you get a byproduct.

Entropy requires no maintenance.

Entropy is the price of structure.

Entropy makes things fall, but life ingeniously rigs the game so that when they do they often fall into place.

Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!

The universe is based on sullen entropy; It falls apart as it goes on

Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die.

Harmonising your biological rhythms with the rhythms of nature minimises entropy and reverses aging.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics … is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.

The total energy of the universe is constant; the total entropy is continually increasing.

In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

If we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy.

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy

Whether you have a leadership title or not, you have the potential to either lead your organization beyond all expectations or inhibit its growth through entropy.

Only entropy comes easy.

I think I have this field around me that makes electronics work bad. It's not like an entropy thing; it happens very quickly.

If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home.

Humanity enveloped in entropy desperately seeking symmetry for peace of mind

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.

The arrow of time doesn't move forward forever. There's a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then, once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there's no more arrow of time.

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds.

Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.