Observation and theory get on best when they are mixed together, both helping one another in the pursuit of truth. It is a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in a theory until it has been confirmed by observation. I hope I shall not shock the experimental physicists too much if I add that it is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they have been confirmed by theory.

Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole.

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.