Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true seekers, which has very few living members at any one time.
Berlin is the place to which I am most closely bound by human and scientific ties.
There have already been published by the bucketsful such brazen lies and utter fictions about me that I would long since have gone to my grave if I had allowed myself to pay attention to them.
Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being.
Only in mathematics and physics was I, through self-study, far beyond the school curriculum, and also with regard to philosophy as it was taught in the school curriculum.
I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however.
The Press, which is mostly controlled by vested interests, has an excessive influence on public opinion.
Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect.
O, Youth: Do you know that yours is not the first generation to yearn for a life full of beauty and freedom?
I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.
A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
He who finds though that lets us penetrate even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great grace. He who, in addition, experiences the recognition, sympathy, and help of the best minds of his times, had been given almost more happiness than one man can bear.
Human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth.
The years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light – only those who have experienced it can understand it.
It may affront the military-minded person to suggest a regime that does not maintain any military secrets.
Genius simply cannot be reduced to a set of rules for anyone to follow.
It would be a sad situation if the bag was better than the meat wrapped in it.
This is a time, when there seems to be a particular need for friends of wisdom and truth to join together.
With me every peep becomes a trumpet solo.
I have lived to prove Thoreau’s contention that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.