"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
"The law of gravity cannot be held responsible for two people falling in love."
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."
"I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food."
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
"The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat."
"An empty stomach is not a good political advisor."
"If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, Of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"
"What I see in Nature is a grand design that we can under stand only imperfectly, one with which a responsible person must look at with humility. This is a genuine religious feeling and has nothing to do with mysticism."
"The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. So to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead."
"The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (1973), ed. Jagdish Mehra Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. (God is subtle, but he is not malicious.)"
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
"I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of life and the joy of work harmoniously combined. Added to this is the spirit of ambition which pervades your very be"
"The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule."
"knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."
"The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth."
"Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone."