Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else — no matter whatsoever.

In space, a black hole is an expanse of cosmos having a pull so great that nothing, no matter can escape. In human beings, a black hole is spending your energy loving someone who takes all your love and gives back nothing in return

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

A black hole is the ultimate manifestation of a region of strong gravity. The pull of gravity in a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape from it and time stands still.

Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our Universe. They are a fundamental driving force of its evolution. They are a dominant source of energy. For every ounce of matter consumed, they yield more than ten times as much energy as the nuclear reactions of fusion and fission that cause our sun to shine and our hydrogen bombs to explode.

Black holes were invented by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder in 1939. Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions of Einstein's equations that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. This solution of Einstein's equations was profoundly novel. It has had enormous impact on the later development of astrophysics.

The problem black holes are supposed to fix is this: if the big bang theory were true, the matter should be evenly distributed in space. Since matter is not evenly distributed in space (we have clumps of matter called galaxies then zillions of miles of nothing between) the believers in the big bang theory are trying to explain why. They are trying to say: "There is matter in between the clumps but we can't see it because it is in black holes." Actually, they are arguing from a lack of evidence not from evidence. This is a poor position to be in when trying to prove your case in a court of law. I don't know if black holes exist or not, but their existence is not proven.

Why are black holes so different from all other objects in the macroscopic Universe? Why are they, and they alone, so elegantly simple? If I knew the answer, it would probably tell me something very deep about the nature of physical laws. But I don’t know.

Black holes might be useful for getting rid of garbage or even some of one's friends.

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.

black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the more they glow.

Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!

The giant black holes in the cores of galaxies, a million to 20 billion times heavier than the Sun, therefore, cannot have been born in the death of a star. They must have formed in some other way, perhaps by the agglomeration of many smaller black holes; perhaps by the collapse of massive clouds of gas.