You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?

The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.