Science

If you want to cross the river of life, you're gonna get wet. And that's not a bug — that's a feature.

People like you who are willing to put in deep, concentrated, single-minded effort are creating the pathways that will lead us out of this crisis.

We are the only species that can learn to think like another of our own species; the only one that records and remembers its history; the only one that tries to decipher the laws of the universe.

In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It's not cool to not know what you're talking about. That's not keeping it real, or telling it like it is. That's just not knowing what you're talking about.

The art of medicine means telling someone what they may already know at some deep non-verbal level, something they may fear or vaguely anticipate, and communicating that something in a way that offers insight and compassion.

You need to raise your expectations of yourself.

Objective truths are true whether or not you believe in them.

I think on some level, role models are overrated. Had I required that another black man from the Bronx had become an astrophysicist for me to become one, I'd still be in the Bronx.

Celebrate idleness. Yes, idleness! Our greatest insights and discoveries have come not when we are doubling down staring at a computer screen, but when we sit back, rub our eyes, go for a walk, read a book or give our children a bath. Isaac Newton did not discover gravity in a laboratory. He was sitting under a tree.

A persistent curiosity can help us reach ambitious goals, even with great roadblocks in the way.

Don't just follow the trends. Think in terms of the physics approach of first principles — rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

Trees, as it turns out, grow out of the air, not out of the ground! That is a beautiful thing to contemplate. And getting the special glasses that allow me to look at the world this way, well for me, that is a really good reason that I went to college.