Stephen Hawking Quotes

It is hard to think of practical applications of the black hole. Because practical applications are so remote, many people assume we should not be interested. But this quest to understand the world is what defines us as human beings.

Studying whether there's life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there's something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That's something that is almost part of being human, and I'm certain that will continue.

Hubble isn't just a satellite; it's about humanity's quest for knowledge.

In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.

For me, one of the highlights of being in the private equity world is that you need to learn a lot and very quickly about different businesses. So it's always a continuing learning experience where you can apply what you know, of course, by way of judgment and by way of numerical analysis. You're always investing in new businesses, which is a learning experience in itself. I think that is a wonderful thing and I think it makes for intellectual challenge and for continued personal growth. That, for me, is the highlight of this job.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.

To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the world for the purpose of changing it.

[Chemistry] laboratory work was my first challenge. ... I still carry the scars of my first discovery-that test-tubes are fragile.

In my mind, the men and women of NASA are history's modern pioneers. They attempt the impossible, accept failure, and then back to the drawing board while the rest of us stand back and criticize.

A longer time perspective is needed because we face a daunting task both in an intellectual and practical sense.

General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together.

The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.

When those myths were created, when the Bible was written, man didn't know what an atom or a germ was, or where the sun went at night, or why the women got pregnant. [Laughs.] They needed stories to answer the questions.

We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens.

If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has conferred on mankind the power not only to create but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

If there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience, Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience... they are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing... the arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity

It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?

When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it. But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

We really didn't devote a lot of time to investigating the scariest aspects of our flight. It was more challenging and productive to concentrate on the remedies, and leave things that couldn't be solved to happen without thinking about them. There is a morbid human curiosity associated with tragic death-producing events. Though naturally, this needs to be kept in perspective.