Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.

The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.

Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.

Certainty ends inquiry.