I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion... Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it... So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.

The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.

One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. I love only nature, and I hate mathematicians.

My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up through the back way without being seen.