Without science, everything is a miracle.

Lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights.

Only via continuing to probe every nook and cranny of the universe that is accessible to us will we truly build a useful appreciation of our own place in the cosmos.

The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.

In science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right hand. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust.

The universe is far stranger and far richer--more wondrously strange--than our meager human imaginations can anticipate. Modern cosmology has driven us to consider ideas that could not even have been formulated a century ago. The great discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have not only changed the world in which we operate, they have revolutionized our understanding of the world--or worlds--that exist, or may exist, just under our noses: the reality that lies hidden until we are brave enough to search for it.

The most exciting thing about being a scientist is not knowing and being wrong. Because that means there is a lot left to learn.

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa.