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

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.

I’ve always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.

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.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

The difference between a tool and a machine is not capable of very precise distinction; nor is it necessary, in a popular explanation of those terms, to limit very strictly their acceptation.

How little do we discover in comparison of those things which now are and forever will be hidden from our sight? The whole of which I am fully persuaded no one will ever be able to dive into, and to explain their causes and effects.

Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.

To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness.

I believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.