Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Being is the great explainer.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

The universe can take quite a while to deliver.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

Blushing is the color of virtue.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

I like to talk about lint and coasters, the expansion of the universe and maybe McDonald’s. I’m completely turned off by the idea of politics.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

I have to be seen to be believed.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

Among physicists, I’m respected I hope.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

It was Einstein’s dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s day hadn’t made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

My beauty secret is absolutely no sun.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

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.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.