Quotes from John C. Mather

There's no such thing as saying that we'll ever find the ultimate cause of stuff. We can only work to push our understanding one step further.

My work at NASA has always been about team efforts, and so it's intrinsically about mentoring. I have been blessed with some brilliant colleagues who were able to take on huge challenges without a lot of guidance.

Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.

We have our religious traditions coming from many thousands of years, and I think to myself, well, you know, if Moses had come down with tablets from the mountain that said, 'And guess what? There are protons and neutrons, and they are made out of quarks,' people wouldn't have understood what he said. So he didn't.

There is no limit to what astrophysicists can do. We can be very curious.

We are discovering what the universe is really like, and it is totally magnificent, and one can only be inspired and awestruck by what we find.

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

I've always been excited to know how we got here.