“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Every star may be a sun to someone.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.

Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it.

We can’t help it. Life looks for life.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

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

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Arguments from authority carry little weight, authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

In that moment it dawned on me that everything has to line up perfectly for something to turn out this awful.

The difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is something awful happening to somebody else, while comedy is something awful happening to somebody else.

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

His laugh sounds an awful lot like my happiness.

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

It is awful hard to get people interested in corruption unless they can get some of it.

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

It is easy to love people when they smell good, but sometimes they slip into the manure of life and smell awful. You must love them just as much when they smell foul.