Quotations
Lines worth remembering, each kept with its source and a note on why it stayed with me.
“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.”
“If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we would know the mind of God.”
“When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge.”
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
“We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics.”
“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
“I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.”
“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future.”
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.”
“Philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.”
“I think, therefore I am.”
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
“Ink is better than the best memory.”
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”