Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.

The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun

I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.