“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don’t know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.

The willingness to be and to have just what God wants us to be and have, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else, would set our hearts at rest, and we would discover the simpler life, the greater peace.

I’m extremely grateful that I discovered my passion. I love movies. I love to watch them, I love to make them.

Deep down in the human spirit, there is a reservoir of courage. It is always available, always waiting to be discovered.

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.

Our goal while on this earth is to transcend our illusions and discover the innate power of our spirit. We are responsible for what we create, and we must therefore learn to act and think with love and wisdom and live in service to others and all life.

As I discovered, there is a great deal of similarity between a boom-bust process in the financial markets and the rise and fall of the Soviet system.

In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.