The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.

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.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.

This part of my life, this little part, is called happiness.

If I lose the ball, I lose it trying to do the right thing. That's the way it is.

Pretended to see nothing in the old woman's taunts. Very hard to imagine nothingness.

Only mediocre ideas can be tested.

Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.

Meanwhile, every eighteen seconds a man beats a woman, every three minutes a man rapes a woman, and every day two men will murder women. And that's just in the United States.

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.