Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

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.

We live by faith and not by sight.

You will not be able to envision your future until you block out the words of those who constantly scorch you with discouraging remarks

You gonna do somethin'? Or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?

Except in mathematics, the shortest distance between point A and point B is seldom a straight line. I don't believe in mathematics.

We need to return to the cosmopolitanism of Alexandria of yore, and marry that with the tolerance and democracy of Europe today

I would give the people of America to their first opportunity to elect a president who doesn't belong to either party since George Washington.

What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

None but the brave and beautiful can love.

I believe in religion against the religious; in the pitifulness of orisons, and in the sublimity of prayer.

Stern Winter loves a dirge-like sound.