Fifteen Quotes from Brian Greene

A clear night sky and a little instruction allows anyone to soar in mind and imagination to the farthest reaches of an enormous universe in which we are but a speck. And there is nothing more exhilarating and humbling than that.

A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.

As the astounding vastness of the universe becomes obscured, there is a throwback to a vision of a universe that essentially amounts to earth, or one's country, or state or city. Perspective becomes myopic.

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly—or ever—gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

I've spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.

If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules...Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Science proceeds along a zig-zag path toward what we hope will be ultimate truth, a path that began with humanity's earliest attempts to fathom the cosmos and whose end we cannot predict.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.

We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?

We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.

When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my "Theorem".

From here.