Murray Gell-Mann

"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."

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

"Imagine how hard physics would be if electrons had feelings!"

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

"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical."

"Reductionism is not a four-letter word."

"There is a tradition of opposition to privileged Authority and to overconfidence."

"The test of an educated person is whether they can make a simple, eloquent argument."

"Cosmology is many things to many people."

"The grand vision of science is that all natural phenomena proceed from underlying, elegant laws."

"In condensed matter, we often find that the elementary excitations are not fundamental particles."

"I suspect that the truth is that we are capable of more than we think we are."

"The world's greatest riddles are hidden in the most obvious places."

"Innovation requires seeing the world as it could be, not just as it is."

"Language is a gift that allows us to share the invisible world within our minds."

"The universe is fundamentally bizarre at its core."

"Precision in language is precision in thought."

"A crude look at the world permits us to distinguish the following domains."

"The challenge is to find the connection between different layers of complexity."

"What is essential is rarely obvious."

"Understanding comes from asking better questions, not from having all the answers."

"Nature abhors both simplicity and complication."

"The pursuit of truth requires intellectual humility."

"Simplicity on the far side of complexity is more valuable than simplicity before complexity."

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

"Excellence is not a destination; it is a direction."

"The real power of a theory lies in its ability to predict the unpredicted."

"We must learn to think in new ways about old problems."

"Creativity is the art of connecting disparate ideas."

"The universe is constructed from patterns that repeat at different scales."