To develop working ideas efficiently, I try to fail as fast as I can.

Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' ...Nobody knows how it can be like that.

There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.

What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?

You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.

I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.