There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. ... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter.

Something unknown is doing we don't know what-that is what our theory amounts to.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of nature, time occupies the key position.