Murray Gell-Mann

"Nature reveals her secrets only to those who ask with precision."

"The universe operates according to principles that are ultimately comprehensible."

"Truth is not invented; it is discovered, bit by bit."

"The patterns of nature are the thoughts of the universe made visible."

"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 5 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that would be minimized rather than exaggerated if one said that in fact, life is sublime."

"Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think."

"What is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?"

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

"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."

"You see, one thing is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."

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

"The principle of parsimony: do not multiply entities beyond necessity."

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

"It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting below the surface of things, one is always at it. There is no point of arriving at the bottom."

"Elementary particles are as important in the world as poets."

"I am not interested in just physics, but in science as a whole, and in the impact of science on humanity."

"Time has no meaning unless we have an observer to measure it."

"We must take it seriously that the laws of nature are actually probability rather than certainty."

"The beauty of a flower is in its simplicity and elegance."

"To do science is to take risks with your ideas."

"A great part of human activity is concerned with the solution of conflicts."

"I value individual intellect and wisdom, but I also value human decency and the ability to cooperate."

"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

"In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. So you might as well do it and do it well."

"The simplest answer is usually the right one."

"I think a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as anyone else."

"We must learn to live together or perish together."

"The conservation of strangeness tells us something about the fundamental nature of reality."