A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

When Da Vinci wanted an effect, he willed, he planned the means to make it happen: that was the purpose of his machines. But the machines of Newton ... are means not for doing but for observing. He saw an effect, and he looked for its cause.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?

The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.