It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

It's us that's really amazing. As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.

No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

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.

Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.

Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.