GENIUS BY STEPHEN HAWKING premieres Wednesdays, May 18-June 1, 2016, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS.

Follow the team’s truly mind-bending challenge: Can they work out why they exist at all?

Watch this full episode (for limited time): http://to.pbs.org/1UtjdaP

(Thanks to Janet Cornwell for this.)

“Oh, you secure and safe ones, you who hide yourselves behind the ramparts of the law, or theology or ethics, so you will not have to look at God’s abyss. Yes, you have secure ground under your feet, while we hang suspended looking out over the endless deeps, but we would not exchange our dizzy insecurity and poverty for your security and abundance. Of God’s will, we know only the eternal; the temporal we must command for our-selves, our selves imprint his wordless bidding even anew on the stuff of reality.”

“Woe to the man so possessed that he thinks he possesses God!”

–Martin Buber (February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Wikipedia

“A lot of people are afraid to say what they want.  That’s why they don’t get what they want.”

“After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.”

–Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, in which he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind, insatiable, and malignant metaphysical will. Wikipedia

Deepak Chopra, M.D.

“Every cell in your body is eavesdropping on your thoughts.”

–Deepak Chopra, M.D. (born October 22, 1947) is an Indian American author, public speaker, alternative medicine advocate, and a prominent figure in the New Age movement.  Wikipedia

Winston Churchill

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his death bed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.”

–Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, RA (November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965) was a British statesman who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Wikipedia

“If you can conquer your fear, you can conquer death.”

–Alexander III of Macedon, commonly known as Alexander the Great (July 356 BCE – June 323 BCE), was a King of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and a member of the Argead dynasty.Wikipedia