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

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

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 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.

Becoming “awake” involves seeing our confusion more clearly.

Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.

I think a repressive regime always fears people who are awakened – particularly ordinary people. If they are awakened, I think governments all over the world feel uncomfortable about that; they want to be in control.

We are witnessing a great awakening. Millions of Texans, millions of Americans are rising up to reclaim our country, to defend liberty and to restore the Constitution.

We are seeing a great awakening. A national movement of We the People, brought together by what unites us – a shared love of liberty, and an understanding of the unlimited potential of free men and free women.

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch’d by the thorns.

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.