1
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.Neil Degrasse Tyson
2
We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.Neil Degrasse Tyson
3
The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars. .Neil Degrasse Tyson
4
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.Neil Degrasse Tyson
5
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?Neil Degrasse Tyson
6
Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?Neil Degrasse Tyson
7
My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.Neil Degrasse Tyson
8
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.Neil Degrasse Tyson
9
Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imaginationNeil Degrasse Tyson
10
I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetimeNeil Degrasse Tyson
11
In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.Neil Degrasse Tyson
12
The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.Neil Degrasse Tyson
13
People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.Neil Degrasse Tyson
14
... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.Neil Degrasse Tyson
15
I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.Neil Degrasse Tyson
16
... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.Neil Degrasse Tyson
17
Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.Neil Degrasse Tyson
18
We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.Neil Degrasse Tyson
19
If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-end…the person will die.Neil Degrasse Tyson
20
In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. Small white stars we call white dwarfs. When stars are made of neutrons, we call them neutron stars. Stars that pulse, we call them pulsars. In biology they come up with big Latin words for things. MDs write prescriptions in a cuneiform that patients can’t understand, hand them to the pharmacist, who understands the cuneiform. It’s some long fancy chemical thing, which we ingest. In biochemistry, the most popular molecule has ten syllables–deoxyribonucleic acid! Yet the beginning of all space, time, matter, and energy in the cosmos, we can describe in two simple words, Big Bang. We are a monosyllabic science, because the universe is hard enough. There is no point in making big words to confuse you further. Want more? In the universe, there are places where the gravity is so strong that light doesn’t come out. You fall in, and you don’t come out either: black hole. Once again, with single syllables, we get the whole job done. Sorry, but I had to get all that off my chest.Neil Degrasse Tyson