With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

When Jesus enters a place revival fire begins.

With just about every player in Australia, his whole goal and ambition is to play for Australia. That's why they're playing first class cricket. It's just a different attitude.

I lived for 10 years in Los Angeles, and the one element that surpasses everything else - that you are very conscious of - is fear. You can smell it.

No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing

We must not wait for things to come, believing that they are decided by irrescindable destiny. If we want it, we must do something about it.

Approach each task in your life, no matter how simple or how complex, with power.

The most Superior amongst the colors in the universe is the color of Devotion.

Compliance does not foster innovation, trust does. You can't sustain long-term innovation, for example, in a climate of distrust.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.