We must be physicists in order … to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.

Any solid lighter than a fluid will, if placed in the fluid, be so far immersed that the weight of the solid will be equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

Were it not for gravity one man might hurl another by a puff of his breath into the depths of space, beyond recall for all eternity.

Coal and diamonds, sand and computer chips, cancer and healthy tissue: throughout history, variations in the arrangement of atoms have distinguished the cheap from the cherished, the diseased from the healthy. Arranged one way, atoms make up soil, air, and water arranged another, they make up ripe strawberries. Arranged one way, they make up homes and fresh air; arranged another, they make up ash and smoke.

For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.