People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing.

You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead.

Any thing or behavior too complex to understand becomes a phenomenon that could be termed spiritual or magical.

Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.

Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

We had to play the hand we were dealt, all of us. Fighting the battles we could win.

A lot of the things that until now seemed unthinkable are starting to be thinkable.

The great mind knows the power of gentleness.

The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.