A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself.

If a person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.

The true purpose of education is to teach a man to carry himself triumphant to the sunset.

The story of Noah is self-contradictory, uncorroborated by independent historical evidence, and is generally at odds with everything we know about our planet's geology, biology, and species diversity.

I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly.' So I suddenly became much more open about it. But I think probably I was hurt by the failure and didn't want to talk about it.

Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were.

If you look at winners of the Nobel Prize in biology, you'll find a fair smattering of people who don't know how to work a pipette.