The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.

Steven Weinberg in Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe

Science continues to be a channel for magic – the belief that for the human will, empowered by knowledge, nothing is impossible. This confusion of science with magic is not an ailment of a kind that has a remedy. It goes with modern life. Death is a provocation to this way of living, because it marks a boundary beyond which the will cannot go.

John Gray, The Immortalization Commission

Why should the universe have a purpose? The question of the purpose of the universe is an invention of human minds, and has no significance, except for the way that it illuminates the psychology of scholarly pursuit and of the pursuing scholars themselves. We should not impose human-inspired attitudes and questions on material things. There is a considerable grandeur, I think, in the presence of our spectacularly majestic universe just hanging there, wholly without purpose.

Peter Atkins, On Being