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

Kant, discussing the various modes of perception by which the human mind apprehends nature, concluded that it is specially prone to see nature through mathematical spectacles. Just as a man wearing blue spectacles would see only a blue world, so Kant thought that, with our mental bias, we tend to see only a mathematical world.

The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.

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.

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

The essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures.