“All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science.”

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The visions we offer our children shape the future.

Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.

Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off.

Nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

One of the greatest gifts adults can give – to their offspring and to their society – is to read to children.

It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public

I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I’m as poor as a church mouse, that’s just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.