It is no doubt technically possible to study metabolism and respiration of fishes during swimming at a constant rate, and of certain insects and birds during flight, and to obtain information similar to that obtained on man during work on a bicycle e...
To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.
If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on.
But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
A hanged sparrow! Who would ever think of hanging a sparrow? It's like flavoring borscht with two mushrooms instead of just one—it's too much!
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
Science often progresses by carving out new distinctions that refine the fuzzy categories of natural language.
If you already have a person's love no sacrifice can be too much to give for it; but any sacrifice is too great to buy it for you.
Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.
Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.
When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.
The epitome of culture is the search for truth, or at least a reasonable approximation of reality, most notably the need to know ourselves and the world around us.
Though we might like to think so, humankind is not at any special, unique or privileged location in the gargantuan, perhaps infinite, Universe.
