Physics is by no means "finished". But the part of it that explains almost everything in the universe—including us—is finished, and much of it has been finished for a century or more. This includes the physics that we are going to need. Nothing at the unsettled frontiers of physics challenges the parts we're going to make use of. What's more, the physics we need is easy to understand, certainly far easier than quantum mechanics, general relativity, or string theory.

Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Above all, I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected to it. ...[I]t mattered to me as a human ...if I managed it even a little bit, I'd not have wasted this little blip of time as a conscious being. I decided to become a physicist.

In physics you have a bit of everything: you need to be good at solving puzzles, but you also need to see the big picture, to separate important from unimportant things, to quickly understand new materials and quickly see the essence of a paper.

This is why I love physics. Everything you learn will come in useful somewhere else, and it's all one big adventure...

All of it is physics, though, whether you are studying starlings or quarks.

Physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. Physics doesn’t take something fascinating and make it boring. Rather, it helps us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world around us. When I bike to work in the fall, I see beauty in the trees tinged with red, orange and gold. But seeing these trees through the lens of physics reveals even more beauty.

Once I got to college and took my first college-level course, I knew that physics was what I wanted to study. I learned about quantum superposition and Schrodinger's cat. It blew my mind, and as they say, the rest is history!

The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.

So in order to understand the physics one must always have a neat balance and contain in his head all of the various propositions and their interelationships because the laws often extend beyond the range of their deductions. This will only have no importance when all the laws are known.

I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn't doing anything else and I didn't want to look dumb, so I thought I'd pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good.

...the ultimate objective of teaching physics is promoting a sound physical thinking and not merely tackling a list of topics.

... now I know that physics is about uncovering the reality behind appearances. It's about glimpsing this deep and hidden architecture of existence itself. It's about embracing that the world is not what it seems and that everything is stranger and simpler than we can imagine, and yet comprehensible.

Physics will always be, at its core, about understanding our place in the Universe...

The beauty of physics is that it can rigorously predict things nobody has seen before, before the emergence of any empirical evidence. Compare to fraudulent fields like psychology that overfit from naive "empirical evidence" to predict nothing.