“When you see someone who has turned his passion into a profit, ask yourself, ‘Why not me?”

“You know you're doing what you love when Sunday nights feel the same as Friday nights....”

“If you can’t embrace failure, or the possibility of failure, or the tremendous fear of failure, you can’t be wildly successful.”

“My mother once told me, when you have to make a decision, imagine the person you want to become someday. Ask yourself, what would that person do?”

“Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.”

“Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.”

“The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.”