“I hope that I may die before my mind fails to a sensible extent.”

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals.”

“I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.”

“How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”

“What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!”

“As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

“Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation.”

“I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.”

“Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.”

“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works.”

“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

“See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.”