To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.

But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.

The young specialist in English Lit, ...lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

Scientists derive satisfaction from figuring out the puzzle. It's about the quest, not the grail.

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.