My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.

— Brian Greene

My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.

— Brian Greene

Nature's patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It's nature's version of nature versus nurture.

— Brian Greene

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

— Brian Greene

Physicists have come to realize that mathematics, when used with sufficient care, is a proven pathway to truth.

— Brian Greene

...quantum mechanics—the physics of our world—requires that you hold such pedestrian complaints in abeyance.

— Brian Greene

Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.

— Brian Greene

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

— Brian Greene

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that's precise, predictive and reliable - a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.

— Brian Greene

Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding...

— Brian Greene