If I am right the Germans will say I was a German, and the French will say I was a Jew; If I am wrong the Germans will say I was a Jew and the French will say I was a German.
My success wasn’t so much due to intelligence, but the fact that I stuck with problems longer.
Strenuous intellectual work and the study of God’s Nature are the angels that will lead me through all the troubles of this life with consolation, strength, and uncompromising rigor.
I believe the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality.
Just as with the man in the fairy tale who turned whatever he touched into gold, with me everything is turned into newspaper clamor.
As an elderly man, I have remained estranged from the society here.
If there is no price to be paid, it is also not of value.
To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.
Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.
A forced faithfulness is a bitter fruit for all concerned.
What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers.
The more a country makes military weapons, the more insecure it becomes: if you have weapons, you become a target for attack.
The economists will have to revise their theories of value.
Marriage is but slavery made to appear civilized.
I should very much like to remain in the darkness of not having been analyzed.
Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.
I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.
What I see in Nature is a grand design that we can understand only imperfectly, one that a responsible person must look at with humility.
All my life I have dealt with objective matters; hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to carry out official functions.
I wouldn’t want to live if I did not have my work. In any case, it’s good that I’m already old and personally don’t have to count on a prolonged future.