I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a very good place…. It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it’s the most wonderful place in the world—it’s the center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world … and while you don’t get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it, and having motivation and desire to keep on

Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.

We are not to tell nature what she’s gotta be... She's always got better imagination than we have.

Some things that satisfy the rules of algebra can be interesting to mathematicians even though they don't always represent a real situation.

No! Not for a second! I immediately began to think how this could have happened. And I realized that the clock was old and was always breaking. That the clock probably stopped some time before and the nurse coming in to the room to record the time of death would have looked at the clock and jotted down the time from that. I never made any supernatural connection, not even for a second. I just wanted to figure out how it happened.

If an apple was magnified to the size of the Earth, then the atoms in the apple would be approximately the size of the original apple.

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder.