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.

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

My desire was not to pass any island without taking possession, so that, one having been taken, the same may be said of all.

I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.

What goes up must come down.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone – both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.

I have discovered that my interest in my dear pupil, Mabel, has ripened into a far deeper feeling than that of mere friendship. In fact, I know that I have learned to love her very sincerely.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

Khrushchev reminds me of the tiger hunter who has picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger’s skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas.

Among physicists, I’m respected I hope.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

Put two or three men in positions of conflicting authority. This will force them to work at loggerheads, allowing you to be the ultimate arbiter.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

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

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that… There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

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

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn’t reduce to physics. So it’s just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

I had a project for my life which involved 10 years of wandering, then some years of medical studies and, if any time was left, the great adventure of physics.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

Time discovers truth.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

I’m someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C – not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries – and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

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.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

It is reasonable that forces directed toward bodies depend on the nature and the quantity of matter of such bodies, as happens in the case of magnetic bodies.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you’re not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it’s actually space that’s moving.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.