Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

When the fabric of the universe becomes unknown, it is the duty of the university to produce weavers.

Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.

I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

There are still so many questions to answer. When you look at any part of the universe, you have to feel humbled.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.

Others of us are lost. We're forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don't recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread.

All our science and philosophy form only an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of mystery. The larger the island grows, the longer the shoreline where the known meets the unknown.

I have often wondered and even laughed at those who fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge.

I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.