I always just want to move along to the next step.
What is known for certain is dull.
Discoveries cannot be planned, they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners
A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.
Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?
Scientists like myself merely use their gifts to show up that which already exists, and we look small compared to the artists who create works of beauty out of themselves. If a good fairy came and offered me back my youth, asking me which gifts I would rather have, those to make visible a thing which exists but which no man has ever seen before, or the genius needed to create, in a style of architecture never imagined before, the great Town Hall in which we are dining tonight, I might be tempted to choose the latter.
I rarely plan my research; it plans me.
I think we're going to do some absolutely spectacular things for the American people.
We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.
If you do not use a muscle or any part of the body, it tends to become atrophic. So is the case with the brain. The more you use it, the better it becomes.
If Christ were only a cistern we might soon exhaust his fullness but who can drain a fountain?