No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.

Optimists think that this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists fear they are right.

We know too much for one man to know too much.