There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

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.

The same law takes place in a system, consisting of many bodies, as in one single body, with regard to their persevering in their state of motion or of rest. For the progressive motion, whether of one single body or of a whole system of bodies, is always to be estimated from the motion of the center of gravity.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

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.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

My friend has a baby. I’m recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

There’s plenty about God that I don’t understand and can’t explain. But I come back to my core belief that God is good, that He’s for us.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

The second time around, I’ll understand that, as a husband, my wife doesn’t care about my opinions. I just need to tell her the things that will continue to help me stack the brownie points.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Working out another system to replace Newton’s laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one’s common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

We should understand the source of our authority and something of the keys that control its power.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

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.

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

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

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.

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.

Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

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.

Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

The same thing is to be understood of all bodies, revolved in any orbits. They all endeavour to recede from the centres of their orbits, and were it not for the opposition of a contrary force which restrains them to and detains them in their orbits, which I therefore call Centripetal, would fly off in right lines with a uniform motion.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

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?

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.