We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

I’m not the sort of person who gives up on things. The first time we crossed the Atlantic in the balloon, it crashed, and we went on and did the Pacific. First time we crossed the Atlantic in a boat, it sank, and we went on and got the record. So, generally speaking, we will pick ourselves up, brush ourselves down, and carry on.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

All art is but imitation of nature.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

Nature hates calculators.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind – this attitude of uncertainty – is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

We have no right to express an opinion until we know all of the answers.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

Nature is not human hearted.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

Many admire, few know.

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.