Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."

But I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth, I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds...I like mathematics largely because it is not human.

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas.

The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

Perception of ideas, rather than the storing of them, should be the aim of education.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

To make use of your mind to think conceptually is to leave substance and attach yourself to form

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas.

People are more interested in ideas than dress.

Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.

I'm this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive.

The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.

All our thinking is of this nature, a free play with concepts.

An idea is a method of evading, circumventing or surmounting through reflection, obstacles that otherwise would have to be attacked by brute force.