“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.

You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

A philosopher once said, It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results. Well, they don’t!

I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys-but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.

I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.

I a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty

I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.

You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

Seraphs share with thee Knowledge; but Art, O Man, is thine alone!

Knowledge without understanding is useless.

Only through Beauty’s morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

I feel like 35. At 35 you’re old enough to know something and young enough to look forward to what you can do with the knowledge. So I stayed at 35!

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it’s Gary Oldman crying; it’s not the character crying.

I am a island – I am an island so large that though I live here, I know it not.