“Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”

“Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.”

“As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.”

“You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out. Even a uranium bomb—the most energetic thing we have produced yet—releases less than 1 percent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning.”

“Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.”

“The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.”

“Do you like that?" I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem like her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad. That!?" She'll say, "No, it's hideous" Then why on earth," I always want to say, "did you walk all the way over there to touch it?" but of course...I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say... Read more - "I'm hungry", "I'm bored", "My feet are tired", "Yes, that one looks nice on you too", "Well, have both of them", "Oh, for fuck sake", "Can't we just go home", "Monsoon? Again? Oh for fuck sake", "then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?" - it doesn't pay, so I say nothing.”