Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.
I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research – to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.
Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.
The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.
There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.