55 Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes (Science, Curiosity & the Cosmic Perspective)

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

We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The most successful people recognize that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Does it mean, if you don’t understand something… then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

This is science. It’s not something to toy with. It’s not something to say, “I don’t believe E = mc2.” You don’t have that option! When you have an established scientific emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe in it…

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody’s easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life’s neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I never want you to quote me citing my authority as a scientist for your knowing something. If that’s what you have to resort to I have failed as an educator.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

As an educator, it’s my duty to empower you to think.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That’s a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

In the end, it’s the people who are curious who change the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I have a personal philosophy in life: If somebody else can do something that I’m doing, they should do it… Those are my priorities in life.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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 lifetime.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

You can’t have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That’s a recipe for disaster. And I don’t mean just whether a politician is scientifically illiterate, but people who vote politicians into office.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

But you can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am proud to be part of a species where a subset of its members willingly put their lives at risk to push the boundaries of our existence.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We should not measure our space-faring era by where footprints have been laid…. We should measure our era by how many people take no notice at all. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

By the way, how much does NASA cost? It’s half a penny on a dollar… The most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to be doing, and that’s making dreams come true… How much would you pay for the universe?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I see science literacy as kind of a vaccine against charlatans who would try to exploit your ignorance.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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

Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It’s the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

It’s OK not to know all the answers. It’s better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s really there.

Neil deGrasse Tyson