For me too, the periodic table was a passion. ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

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.

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it