"You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?"
"The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes."
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Source: Freeman J. Dyson (2016). “Dear Professor Dyson: Twenty Years of Correspondence Between Freeman Dyson and Undergraduate Students on Science, Technology, Society and Life”, p.129, World Scientific
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"The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe."
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"If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades."
"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."
"The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries."