Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

So, okay, I'm not a genius. Vincent Van Gogh and Albert Einstein were geniuses.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry.

As beavers build dams and bees build hives, human beings have spears. Or take the high intelligence of human beings, the ability to make plans, to transmit information - that was also there before, but that, together with the tools, was not enough to make man special.

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

Brains first and then Hard Work.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.

Wit beyond measure is a man's greatest treasure.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

Intelligence is a critical thing.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

My biggest resource is my mind.

I have an IQ of about 160, I taught science for about fifteen years.

...comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

A research problem is not solved by apparatus; it is solved in a man's head.

Intelligence is called the world's second oldest profession for a reason. Everyone does it.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.