“We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it.”

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles.

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

Uncommon men require no common trust; give him but scope and he will set the bounds.

Every true genius is bound to be naive.

There is bound to be a regression toward the mean.

Money is bounded; we only have so much of it. Love goes on forever.

Aspire, break bounds. Endeavor to be good, and better still, best.

I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.

The wise man sets bounds even to his innocent desires.

Love is boundless. Human energy is not.