The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on. No trees, no cool breeze, no best friends. Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...

One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.

Feeling guilty is not a substitute for loving somebody

Trying to meet new women, it's always a little more difficult as opposed to calling somebody I knew that's single and trying to rebuild that connection.

If I had ever been set down in any one place and told I was to play there, and nowhere else, for the rest of my life, I should have chosen the Old Course at St. Andrews.

A good man's life is never quite ended; something of it always remains to touch and illuminate other lives.

We learn nothing by being right.

A small unkindness is a great offence.

With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.

We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.