It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.

The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.

Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility toward truth is one of its attributes.

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations-then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation-well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

You cannot disturb the tiniest petal of a flower without the troubling of a distant star.

It is reasonable to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.