Quote

If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.

Steven Weinberg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steven Weinberg
Age: 88 †
Born: 1933
Born: May 3
Died: 2021
Died: July 23
Cosmologist
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Taken
Hide
Religion
Bother
Pain
Atheism
Seems
Concern
Humans
Plans
Impolite
Great
Seem
Impious
Would
Special
Pains
Prayer
Prayers

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

Image
If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.
Steven Weinberg
Image
A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.
Steven Weinberg
Image
I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
Steven Weinberg
Image
A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word hermeneutics in the dictionary.
Steven Weinberg
Image
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg
Image
In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion, should be done and may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization.
Steven Weinberg
Image
It does not help that some politicians and journalists assume the public is interested only in those aspects of science that promise immediate practical applications to technology or medicine.
Steven Weinberg
Image
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist's task is to find this deeper symmetry.
Steven Weinberg
Image
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
Steven Weinberg
Image
As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.
Steven Weinberg
Image
How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
Steven Weinberg
Image
The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.
Steven Weinberg
Image
Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.
Steven Weinberg
Image
It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg