When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood.

Indeed, the only truely serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truely serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set limits, describes the boundaries of human exsistence.

The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven's one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.

The larger the searchlight, the larger the searchlight of the unknown.

The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside--and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.

Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.

Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about?