One [practitioner of science] is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ."

"When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone."

"The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts."

God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.

"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man."