Stephen Hawking Quotes

I do not know why I have always been fascinated by science or why I have been driven by the intense desire to make some original contribution. And although I have had some degree of success as a scientist, it is hard to say precisely why.

I have always focused on basic research, motivated by a desire to understand the world.

Typically, there's a drive in science to do something just to say you've done it.

Those people have no real interest in a science who only begin to get excited about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

Most of us who become experimental physicists do so for two reasons; we love the tools of physics because to us they have intrinsic beauty, and we dream of finding new secrets of nature as important and as exciting as those uncovered by our scientific heroes.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

If you're talking to a child, you're going, 'This is the wonder of science and here's why I'm so fascinated by it.'

The pursuit of natural knowledge, the investigation of the world - mental and material - in which we live, is not a dull and spiritless affair: rather is it a voyage of adventure of the human mind, a holiday for reckless and imaginative souls.

We are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game.

I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science.

It is important to fund young researchers who want to do curiosity-driven research. Curiosity-driven research is a part of life. Some people are curious. They want to learn more about nature and society should help that. It's like art: you can learn more and bring more beauty.

You can only go into science because you're interested in it.

Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting.

Science is really about describing the way the universe works in one aspect or another in all branches of science—how a life-form works, how this works, how that works. ... You have to have a natural curiosity for that.

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him …

It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

My advice is not to aim for prizes and awards. We are in this for the joy of research, the fascination, the love of science. That's the reward, really.

I always say to my students that being a scientist is like being an explorer, and I really mean that because, in a sense, I think in science we explore the world, the universe around us.

You should enter science because you are fascinated by it. That's what I did.

What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!

I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks falls to the creative genius; the other requires a sort of sagacity combined with perfectionism.

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.