Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.

when I wrestled, I would set aside the time to wrestle, so that in my mind it didn't interfere with my study time. That helped me psychologically. When I'm wrestling, I'm not studying the universe. And when I'm studying the universe, I'm not wrestling.

That the north star is the brightest in the night sky. I'd guess about 9 out of 10 people think this. But it does not require a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn the answer. The North Star is not even in the top 40 in the night sky. It's the 49th brightest star. Rather dull and boring by most measures.

How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!"

If your ego starts out, "I am important, I am big, I am special," you're in for some disappointments when you look around at what we've discovered about the universe. No, you're not big. No, you're not. You're small in time and in space. And you have this frail vessel called the human body that's limited on Earth.

There are two kinds of comments that I get. One is, oh, you're such a natural up there, and the other one is, you're working hard up there. And the ones who say I'm working hard are teachers, they're the educators; they're the people who are the performers. It's a huge investment of my psycho-emotional energy to pull that off and to make it look smooth.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there.