Many of my heroes, like Galileo, Maxwell, Newton and, less explicitly, Einstein thought what they were doing was finding out what God is. All of them had this inspiration that if you want to find out what God is, you have to look at his work.

In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.

An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake.

The brain rewards us for interacting with beautiful things. In this way, evolution wants to encourage us to do what is good for us.

In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.

I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy-- of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake.