“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

“A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”

“We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.”

“We make our purpose.”

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggre...”

“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”

“Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.”

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. ”

“Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us upthe iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brainswere manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away...”

“Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years aw...”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”