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

Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

What an astonishing thing a book is.

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

To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

We are all stardust.

Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

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.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.

I’d really like to be in closer contact with life. I’m a little too distant, I guess. I like to place myself outside.

Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone, beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid.

The dawn is not distant, nor is the night starless; love is eternal.

Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.

The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

If we fail to act soon, the scars of a major nuclear disaster will mark our immediate and distant future.