It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

I’m never going to go to Mars, but I’ve helped inspire, thank goodness, the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

I’m crepuscular.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

The march of the human mind is slow.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

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.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

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

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

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

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

New discoveries in science will continue to create a thousand new frontiers for those who still would adventure.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn’t the thing.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

Creditors have better memories than debtors.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.