You have to really kind of think about our own existence here in the universe. You realize that people often say, ‘I hope to go to heaven when I die.’ In reality, if you think about it, you go to heaven when you’re born. You arrive on a planet that has the proper mass, has the gravity to contain water and an atmosphere, which are the very essentials for life. And you arrive on this planet that’s orbiting a star just at the right distance — not too far to be too cold, or too close to be too hot — and just at the right distance to absorb that star’s energy and then, with that energy, cause life to evolve here in the first place. In reality, you know, God has really given us a stage, just looking at where we were around the moon, a stage on which we perform. And how that play turns out is up to us, I guess.

—Jim Lovell, Business Insider, March 2017

We’re far from the point of fatigue when our brain starts warning us. We give up, as it were. Our brain tells us, don’t go, don’t go. What we want to do is push beyond that moment. When you feel like you could continue to go, you can stop.

—Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Harvard University, 2016

Black holes aren’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.

—Stephen Hawking, Oxford University, October 27, 2017