“Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe.”

It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole.

Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, “Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!”

The number of people who consider themselves to be religious and going to services is dropping, and the number of people who consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious is increasing.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.

Scientists and artists are both living in the cultural milieu that they come up in. They’re always responding to what is happening culturally.

Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they’re not necessarily going to anybody’s church.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what’s deeper.

Right now, culturally, we’re seeing a really interesting evolution in ideas about spirituality and the world, right?

There’s a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used.

I’m found of what’s called emergence – as the universe gets more complex, new laws can emerge. Like evolution – there’s things that you just aren’t able to explain, even if you had an understanding of atoms.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also become sensitive to the ways – to all that is not amenable to explanation. Things that, even if you had an explanation, what good would it be?

It’s not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science – people love science, especially the millennials.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics

The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely – I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.

New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves.

I think synergies are a lot like UFOs: Lots of people claim to have seen them, but few can actually prove they exist.

This is the step beyond our highest experiences of love and union, a step in which self is not around to divide, separate, objectify or claim anything for itself. Self does not know God; it cannot love him, and from the beginning has never done so.

As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don’t claim to know anything with certainty — it’s the believers who know it all.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

Blest be the art that can immortalize,–the art that baffles time’s tyrannic claim to quench it.

The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to “civilize” Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.