Preoccupied with a single leaf, you won't see the tree. Preoccupied with a single tree, you'll miss the entire forest.
Topology and number theory are my faves.
The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion.
There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see, but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far away to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.
Forever is a very long time, especially the bit towards the end.
What we see of the universe is vast. We know that the universe is something like 90 billion light-years across.
I think there's a certain lyricism in the telling of a scientific story.
Oh, one world at a time!
A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.