Neil deGrasse Tyson

1958– · American astrophysicist and science communicator

Topics: science, learning, life, physics

• It's the inspired student that continues to learn on their own. That's what separates the real achievers in the world from those who pedal along, finishing assignments.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Cosmologists have plenty of ego. How could you not when your job is to deduce what brought the universe into existence?

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say we have been empowered by the universe to figure itself out — and we have only just begun.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Words that make questions may not be questions at all.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Yes, the universe had a beginning. Yes, the universe continues to evolve.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is an outlook. It's more of a lens through which you observe what goes on around you.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• This universality of physical laws drives scientific discovery like nothing else.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

  — 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. (From the first Cosmos: ASO episode, Standing Up in the Milky Way.)

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• If you start wielding a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. And maybe they’re not. Maybe it's more subtle than that. And so your toolkit has to be able to morph into what is necessary for what it is that you confront at that moment.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• Within one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) than all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world.

  — Neil deGrasse Tyson