Success Quote by Stephen Hawking

Ambition doesn’t get much cleaner - or more audacious - than Hawking’s: not to add a footnote to physics, but to swallow the whole book. The line reads like a mission statement stripped of professional modesty, and that bareness is the point. “My goal is simple” is a sly rhetorical feint: he frames the most impossible intellectual project imaginable as if it’s just good housekeeping. It’s a scientist’s version of deadpan humor, but also a claim about temperament. Hawking is advertising a kind of courage: the willingness to state the grand question without apology, even in a field that often rewards incrementalism.

The subtext is less about arrogance than about unity. “Complete understanding” signals the late-20th-century dream of a single framework that would stitch together gravity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology - a “theory of everything” not as branding, but as a genuine longing for coherence. The second half tightens the screws: “why it is as it is” stays within physics (laws, constants, initial conditions), then “why it exists at all” vaults toward philosophy and theology. Hawking’s trick is to treat that jump as continuous rather than taboo, implying that existence itself is a legitimate scientific target.

Context matters: Hawking became the public face of cosmology while living with a body that steadily narrowed his physical options. That makes the quote feel like a refusal to let limits define the scale of his thinking. It also explains its cultural stickiness: it flatters the public desire for ultimate answers while keeping the language plain enough to sound like common sense.