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Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident.

What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"...

I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate.

To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!

The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God.

Socrates … said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved.

Beauty … is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses.

The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown.

Beauty, then, is the beauty-lover’s way to the spirit—but only the way, only the means.

Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so, too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing.

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.