Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709, 366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the universe and the same number of electrons.

Something unknown is doing we don't know what.

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and.'

Human life is proverbially uncertain; few things are more certain than the solvency of a life-insurance company.

To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.