To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.

Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.

As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.

I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity.

It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.

Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this. Upon seeing a distorted image of his face, reflected on the inside cylindrical surface of the bore while inside an MRI (magnetic-resonance-imaging) machine-a device made possible by his early physical researches on nuclear magnetic resonance (1938).