It is not the neutrality of the judge that makes justice, but his passionate will to do right. And the same is true of the scientist: it is not his indifference to truth but his passionate love of it that makes him a scientist.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference man brings imagination — and that is the beginning of all we call civilization.

It is a great mistake to think that the motive which leads a man of science to his work is the desire for practical application. He is moved chiefly by curiosity, that most profound, most arrogant, and most invincible of all the passions.

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development. If someone had asked Newton why apples fell downward rather than sideward, Newton might have reflected on this sufficiently to arrive at the concept of universal gravitation.

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.

The aim of science is not to open a door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

The naturalist is not the man who observes most, but the man who is most astonished by what he observes. To see the ordinary with extraordinary eyes — that is the whole of science.

It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

We must not inquire too curiously into the uses of a discovery. All science has two aspects: the aspect of pure knowledge and the aspect of power; and though knowledge itself is beautiful, the aspect of power is sometimes horrible.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet the history of science is a history of that ambition refusing to accept the universe's indifference.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

We are apt to think that our ideas are the measure of things, and that silence means ignorance. But nature has other standards than ours, and there is a vast deal going on in the world which we cannot translate into human speech.

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best — and therefore never scrutinize or question.

The universe is not made of stories, but of atoms — yet I find myself living inside a story I did not write, governed by rules I did not choose, and dying toward an end I cannot name. This is the human condition, and it is also its dignity.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

The tendency of modern science is to reduce all natural phenomena to the action of matter, and to explain the complex by the simple. But this tendency has its dangers; it may lead us to forget that the simple is always an abstraction, and that the real world is infinitely complex.

We are under a heavy debt to those who first broke the crust of ignorance, even though what they discovered may be of no direct use to us. It is not the finding but the seeking that is most consequential.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. And yet this refinement is purchased at a terrible price — the price of losing touch with the concrete and the living, and of substituting for it a pale, bloodless abstraction.

It is not so much that man has evolved from the ape, as that both have evolved from a common ancestor — and the difference between a man who sees this and one who does not is not a difference of knowledge, but of imagination.

It is not observation of nature that makes a man thoughtful; it is the fact that nature never answers. The grown man asks, and asks, and the sphinx remains silent, and suddenly he remembers that it always has been so.

The universe is not indifferent to intelligence; it simply has not yet been asked the right questions. But the asking itself changes both the asker and the universe.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet the history of science is largely the history of our stubborn insistence that it must be.

We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and often the beast stirs in us and utters some old, forgotten note that sends strange vibrations through the framework of our being.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

We are beginning to see that to ask what is the use of science is as vulgar as to ask what is the use of a sunset, and almost as stupid.

The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress on the minute study of details, and to overlook the great generalizations. It is the study of generalizations that liberates the human mind.

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend it. And that is a political choice that each of us has to make.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. It is indifferent to our need for certainty, and it is precisely this indifference that makes the pursuit of understanding so urgent.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first. Every important scientific advance has had to fight its way to acceptance against the prejudice of its age — and the prejudice of its age is simply the common sense of its age.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience with which Spinoza must have waited for years to see his cherished conception of a mathematical proof of the existence of God.

A fact acquires its true and full value only through the idea which is developed from it.

We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and hold within us the sheep, the lion, and the eagle of our forefathers. Strange kinships bind us to the creatures of field and forest, and the blood in our veins runs down from a time when the world was young.