All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description.

The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.

There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell.

We are not important to the universe. That's the bad news.

God is not described in equations.

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

There's no verbs before time itself exists, right? There's no popping into existence, there's no fluctuating, there's no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing.

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

Decency is such a rare thing in this world, and it can only be repaid with loyalty.

You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.

Minority views expressed in films simply don't sell tickets.

When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

All things are cause for either laughter or weeping.

One may imagine that a man who blew the trumpet for his living would be glad to play the violin for his amusement.