"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

"Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."

"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 is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality."

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere."

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out."

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."

"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."

"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path."

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."

"I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."

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

"I don't want to believe. I want to know."

"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers"

"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent."

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."

"She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

"The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."

"The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas."

"Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars."

"Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."

"But I could be wrong."

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

"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

"You have to know the past to understand the present."

"My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic."

"In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other."

"If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read."

"But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine."

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

"Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic."

"We are all star stuff."

"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy"

"Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing."

"We are star stuff harvesting sunlight."

"You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals."

"Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs."

"Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil."

"Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves."

"We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands."

"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars."