Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The people who fail in life are those whose ambitions were insufficient to overcome all the forces that work against them. And yes, failure is common to us all. But ambitious people use their failures as lessons to heed, as they push forward toward their goals.

Don’t fear change. Don’t fear failure. The only thing to fear is loss of ambition.

knowing enough about a subject to think you are right, but not enough about the subject to know you are wrong.

On my deathbed, one thought I will surely have comes from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He notes that we who die are the lucky ones. Most people—most genetic combinations of who could ever exist—will never be born, and so will never have the opportunity to die.

most of the history of life on Earth you did not exist. A condition that continued right up until your birth. That is not a hard thought to consider. Nor is it depressing. You simply had no existence or awareness of anything at all. It should therefore not be hard to consider the likelihood that the state of death is no different.

I want my children exposed to other ideas and let them make a decision for themselves as to what they want to believe. I only want to teach them compassion, and if they follow that through science or religion, good for them.

“In my mind God wrote two books. The first book is the Bible, where humans can find the answers to their questions on values and morals. The second book of God is the book of nature, which allows humans to use observation and experiment to answer our own questions about the universe.”

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.”

“Without God, why should people be civil to one another?” or “What’s to stop people from committing crimes or even murder in the absence of divine judgment?”

As the saying goes, we spend the first years of children’s lives teaching them to talk and walk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.