"It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness."

"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy"

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"But I could be wrong."

"You must continue to gain expertise, but avoid thinking like an expert."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Understand that you, yourself, are no more than the composite picture of all your thoughts and actions. In your relationships with others, remember the basic and critically important rule: If you want to be loved, be lovable. If you want respect, set a respectable example!"

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