To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.
I do not much believe in education. Each person ought to be his or her own model, however frightful that may be.
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.
Overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organise peace on this planet.
The payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
A human being is part of a whole called by us the universe.
What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion.
Humankind’s desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government.
The Nuremberg Trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law of the state.
The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.
Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
Those who manage their way into a crisis are not necessarily the right people to manage their way out of a crisis.
The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.
At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.
All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.
They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.
The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.
It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.
It is impossible to get out of a problem by using the same kind of thinking that it took to get into it.