I thought I'd better check this third plate, which is another date, see if there's an image there in the right place that would be consistent with the images on the other plates. That was the final proof.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.

I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.

I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.

I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.

I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren't. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like.

What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.

I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn't expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?

A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn't healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

I thought I'd better check this third plate, which is another date, see if there's an image there in the right place that would be consistent with the images on the other plates. That was the final proof.

Although my early equipment was very modest, later I made my own and they were more powerful.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem.

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you're competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.

Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.

That's the way I got along in life. I don't ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can't do it myself, I don't deserve to get it.

I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

From 1836, down to last year, there is no proof of the Government having any confidence in the duration of peace, or possessing increased security against war.

There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.

Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.

Jim Cameron is proof that if you are good, you'll get promoted.

The best proof of the high quality of American beef is the continued negative BSE findings supported by the highest surveillance possible. The administration should be working to increase our surveillance of BSE, not scaling it back.

There has to be a measure of faith. That's what this business is all about: trusting in something that may never show up, that you have no concrete proof of.

A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution. But though death is not desired, the result of it may be, for dying to the Christian is the way to life eternal.

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.