Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well. And having done it well, he loves to do it better.
There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.
It’s a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn’t punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly.
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.
Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.
Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker’s.
Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.
Power is the by-product of understanding.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.