Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

My first popular book, ‚A Brief History of Time,‘ aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side… It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

I don’t care how many beauty treatments you have, I don’t care which bag you’re carrying – you have to have a dress.

I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Sin is geographical.

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

We are a nation of communities… a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.