Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.
If the laws of physics are not strictly causal the most that can be said is that the behaviour of the conscious brain is one of the possible behaviours of a mechanical brain. Precisely so; and the decision between the possible behaviours is what we call volition.
Just as we were misled into untenable ideas of the aether through trusting to an analogy with the material ocean, so we have been misled into untenable ideas of the attributes of the microscopic elements of world-structure through trusting to analogy with gross particles.
The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.
Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility toward truth is one of its attributes.
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.
An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.
You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.
I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.
It is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.
The pursuit of truth in science transcends national boundaries. It takes us beyond hatred and anger and fear. It is the best of us.
The mathematics is not there till we put it there.