A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.

Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.

Scientists like myself merely use their gifts to show up that which already exists, and we look small compared to the artists who create works of beauty out of themselves. If a good fairy came and offered me back my youth, asking me which gifts I would rather have, those to make visible a thing which exists but which no man has ever seen before, or the genius needed to create, in a style of architecture never imagined before, the great Town Hall in which we are dining tonight, I might be tempted to choose the latter.

Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?

What is known for certain is dull.

Discoveries cannot be planned, they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners

People are best judged by their actions