Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

If all that you see, do, measure and discover is the will of a deity, then ideas can never be proven wrong, you have no predictive power, and you are at a loss to understand the principles behind most of the fundamental interconnections of nature.

Give a kid a book, and you change the world. In a way, even the universe.

I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.

I can't think that leaving Earth once is enough.

The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.

I would expunge the word "aptitude" from our vocabulary, because if you're interested in something, that's all that matters. You'll spend more time doing it, that than anything else, and possibly more time doing it than anybody else. And that's all that matters, because in the end, if you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career.