All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.

Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.

In real science a hypothesis can never be proved true...A science which confines itself to correlating phenomena can never learn anything about the reality underlying the phenomena, while a science which goes further than this and introduces hypotheses about reality, can never acquire certain knowledge of a positive kind about reality; in whatever way we proceed, this is forever denied us.

We may as well cut out group theory. That is a subject that will never be of any use in physics.

The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker.