It’s all a gift. So be grateful for every day.

You have to ride the wave and never wait for it to be calm, because it never will be.

I REALIZED IN THOSE DAYS HOW TENUOUS OUR EXISTENCE IS,” HE WROTE IN HBR. “WE HAVE ONLY ONE LIFE, AND IT MUST BE LIVED TO THE FULLEST—NOT SOMEDAY, BUT NOW.

We are too often advised to live life to the fullest. That’s too much pressure. The key is to find joy and poignancy in the quiet and mundane. Life is lived between the so-called big moments.

One of them—I forgot the others— that I thought was really interesting is, Don’t take yourself too seriously. And I believe in that—I think I believe in that.

According to Egyptian regulations, the chairman of the department, the dean of the faculty of sciences, the president of Alexandria University, and the minister of higher education, they all have to sign off.

But look at what we can do at a place like Caltech, with scientists from the Middle East to Europe to Asia to America.

Today I was reading the latest issue of Nature, and somebody had written an editorial that said scientists should be basically directing their work to the service of society by making the discoveries that are relevant. The problem is I don’t know what’s relevant!

Arriving in the States, I had the feeling of being thrown into an ocean. The ocean was full of knowledge, culture, and opportunities, and the choice was clear: I could either learn to swim or sink. The culture was foreign, the language was difficult, but my hopes were high. I did not speak or write English fluently, and I did not know much about western culture in general, or American culture in particular.

We started at Caltech asking very simple questions: how do we understand the molecule dynamics or the dynamics of molecules, emotions and so on, molecules but in a coherent fashion.