“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.

Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it.

We can’t help it. Life looks for life.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Arguments from authority carry little weight, authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.

I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

Don’t judge everyone else by your own limited experience.

The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons.

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

It is awful hard to get people interested in corruption unless they can get some of it.

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

It is easy to love people when they smell good, but sometimes they slip into the manure of life and smell awful. You must love them just as much when they smell foul.

I’m going to be an awful driver.

This wine is awful. Get me another glass.

To live would be an awfully big adventure.

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.