Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

If people like Edison had waited to make every - or Ben Franklin or some of those people had waited to solve every problem on Earth before they did their research or before they were curious about doing something new, we'd never have made a lot of the progress we have.

Experience hobbles progress and leads to abandonment of difficult problems; it encourages the initiated to walk on the shady side of the street in the direction of experiences that have been pleasant. Youth without experience attacks the unsolved problems which maturer age with experience avoids, and from the labors of youth comes progress. Youth has dreams and visions, and will not be denied.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions.

Your current thinking got you here. Only new thinking will get you out.

Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.

I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated - and that the most important thing was problem creation.

If people aren't laughing at your dreams, your dreams aren't big enough !

I've always been making up my own restrictions for myself, from day one, and it's compelling, because it forces me to think. That's always been a driving force for me.

This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: 'We know you said it was impossible, but we're going to do this, this, and that to get us there.'

Don't worry about mistakes. Making things out of mistakes, that's creativity.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

I think Little Nicky was a divergence from the films Adam Sandler was used to doing, and he was taking a risk. I admire him for doing that.

When you’re obsessing about one thing, you can reach insights about how to solve hard problems. If you have too many things to think about, you’ll get to the superficial solution, not the brilliant one.

I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually. To me, solving problems is a bit like a drug. You’re on it, and you can’t get off.

One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream.