The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.

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.

There is so little time. We need to make every moment count.

Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea.

We must all learn a good lesson - how to live together.

Growing up in Michigan was fine...until I realized where I was.

My gigs are built on improvisation: I go out there and I'm like the Energizer bunny.

Those chess lovers who ask me how many moves I usually calculate in advance, when making a combination, are always astonished when I reply, quite truthfully, 'as a rule not a single one'

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.

And one rose in a tent of sea and gave A darkening shudder; water fell away; The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.