Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five.
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.
Newton’s apple and Cezanne’s apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution’s countless mistakes.
The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture.
Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.
If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.
Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.
The jester is brother to the sage.
If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler’s eye, determine the direction of the journey.
Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
Honor is decency without vanity.