We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.
This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.
It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.
If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.
Research is an expression of faith in the possibility of progress. The drive that leads scholars to study a topic has to include the belief that new things can be discovered, that newer can be better, and that greater depth of understanding is achievable. Research, especially academic research, is a form of optimism about the human condition.
I wonder why people use only walls for hanging pictures.
Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, 'Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually.
An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.