Obviously the most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.

The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.

Perhaps adjustment and stabilization, while good because it cuts your pain, is also bad because development towards a higher ideal ceases?

Be good to your sacred self. Love life.

You know what turns dirt into diamonds?""Pressure. Weight. Heat...""The geological equivalent of torture.

Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

Adhesion to one idea is monomania; to few, slavery.

I consider the Chinese government's policy among the most intelligent in the world.

When I talk to idiots, I get loud!

God to me is love. It's the ruler of all things, whether it's with a person or with music or with your TV. I feel like it's this energy. God is energy, love is energy.

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

I don't make mistakes. I make prophecies which immediately turn out to be wrong.

Over the past 20 years, I have presented many science programmes on BBC1. But none is, I think, more socially important, or of more human interest, than this ongoing series of 'Child of Our Time.'