The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.6

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of those branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

the biblical texts themselves might suggest that there were better questions to be asking, which are actually screened out by concentrating on the wrong ones.

The author explains the evidence for they would help from astronomy. He says that if planets are behaving in a way that cannot be explained by what is already known, then another planet is searched for which would explain their behavior. This, he says, is actually how the more distant planets were discovered. We look, then, for something that would explain what is not inexplicable from what we already see.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

The Galileo saga is typically told as a conflict between science and religion. But in reality it was a conflict among Christians over the correct philosophy of nature. Was it Aristotle's quality or Galileo's quantity? Galileo's victory was the triumph of the idea that the nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint.

One discovers, and names. Conquers and civilizes.