Arno Penzias

"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."

"We are made of star stuff."

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."

"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct."

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."

"Science is not only a disciple of reason but also of romance and passion."

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

"There is a limit to how much bad science you can do."

"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff."

"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy."

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

"Books are the treasuries of humanity."

"There's something in the human brain that resonates with truth."

"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head."

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle."

"Wisdom is the accumulated experience of the ages."

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet the general population knows almost nothing about science and technology."

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be discovered."

"Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce."

"A religion that requires you to deny the evidence of the natural world is a religion of ignorance."

"If you want to make an apple pie, you must first create the universe."

"The universe is a safe place."

"We've made a lot of mistakes and there's a lot of work to do, but the human spirit is powerful."

"I don't want to believe. I want to know."

"The truth is that science is not bound by the laws of nature; rather, it is the study of them."