The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true.

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.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.

Tutoring a four year old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy.

Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.

The best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one but the counterfeit of it.

I hate flossing, I wish I just had one long curvy tooth. They didn't have to make separations for me.

If we did realize the difference between the vital few and the trivial many in all aspects of our lives, and if we did something about it, we could multiply anything that we valued.

Subsequent to the original Quicken, the whole idea that we, as a consumer products company, could actually make business products, that was a whole revolution in our thinking.

Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.