When he was 21, Stephen Hawking learned he had motor neurone disease.
Doctors told him he had a few years to live.
He’s now 72 and one of the foremost physicists alive — a professor at the University of Cambridge, an investigator of black holes, and the author of the bestselling book, A Brief History of Time.
Here are a dozen quotes showing Hawking’s approach to science and to life.
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On Disability
On Priorities
On Free Will
His Advice to His Three Children
On Why He Writes for a Popular Audience
“I put a lot of effort into writing A Briefer History at a time when I was critically ill with pneumonia because I think that it’s important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.”
On the Value of String Theory
On His Health
On Hitting Roadblocks
“It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.”
This article originally appeared on Business Insider
