Stephen Hawking Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

Stephen Hawking
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.

Stephen Hawking
Look up at the stars, and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

Stephen Hawking
A million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.

Stephen Hawking
We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.

Stephen Hawking
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.

Stephen Hawking
The zero-G part was wonderful and the higher-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!

Stephen Hawking
If there is one thing we can be sure enough of in physics it is that all time exists with equal reality.

Stephen Hawking
You would have to fly around the world four hundred million times to add one second to your life; but your life would be reduced by more than that by all those airline meals.

Stephen Hawking
There is a two-way trade between science fiction and science. Science fiction suggests ideas that scientists incorporate into their theories, but sometimes science turns up notions that are stranger than any science fiction.

Stephen Hawking
But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System - and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

Stephen Hawking
I think the universe is completely self-contained. It doesn't have any beginning or end, it doesn't have any creation or destruction.

Stephen Hawking
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

Stephen Hawking
We see the universe the way it is because we exist.

Stephen Hawking
So great a contribution to physics was Two New Sciences that scholars have long maintained that the book anticipated Isaac Newton's laws of motion.

Stephen Hawking
Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

Stephen Hawking
The light that we see from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object we have seen, the light left some eight billions years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past.

Stephen Hawking
We may not yet be able to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before, but at least we can do it in the mind.

Stephen Hawking
It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.

Stephen Hawking
There may be no ultimate theory, and even if there is, we may not find it. But it is surely better to strive for a complete understanding than to despair of the human mind.

Stephen Hawking
We still believe that the universe should be logical and beautiful; we just dropped the word "God."

Stephen Hawking
Each equation, I was told, would halve the sales of the book. But that was okay. Equations are necessary if you are doing accountancy, but they are the boring part of mathematics. Most of the interesting ideas can be conveyed by words or pictures.

Stephen Hawking
In an infinite number universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinity of stars on each side of it.

Stephen Hawking
I do not agree with the view that the universe is a mystery, something that one can have intuition about but never fully analyze or comprehend.

Stephen Hawking
Time refuses to be simplified or reduced. You cannot say that it is only found in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in everyone imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. It is all of these things.

Stephen Hawking