When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding.

Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

We're on this planet for the briefest of moments in cosmic terms, and I want to spend that time thinking about what I consider the deepest questions.

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

I was holding [my four-year-old daughter] and I said, 'Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe.' And she turned to me and said, 'Daddy, universe or multiverse?'

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. Where did the totality of reality come from? Did time have a beginning?

Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.

God is a spirit. The spirit dwells in a soul. God is you.

Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.

Early on, when my wife and I were dating, we went to the grocery store, and I told her that sometimes I just buy birthday cakes, and I eat them. And she said: 'Really? I do, too.'

The thing is you can be a great designer but you can also be lazy or not understand the other person's preferences or be more concerned about being a star than being good at what you do.

Just because you're perfectionist doesn't mean you're perfect.

That grief is the most durable which flows inward, and buries its streams with its fountain, in the depths of the heart.

I'm interested in that hybrid - the place between the real world and my imagination. There's a friction that's created between the things we imagine and the things that exist.

I'm dying of boredom. Or maybe just dying.

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.