"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile."
"Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it is an enemy."
"The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God."
"Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other."
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
"The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess."
"Science is organised knowledge."
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
"Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value."
"There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain."
"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."
"A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known."
"You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time."
"Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."
"There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them."
"There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"It is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand."
"The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me."
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
"in L. Infeld, ‘Quest’ (1942) Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality."
"Great and small suffer the same mishaps."
"I don't describe the future. I try to prevent it."
"Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it."
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it"
"You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chance there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man."
"The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness."
"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him."
"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself."
"in E. T. Bell ‘Mathematics, Queen and Servant of the Sciences’ (1952) I learned many years ago never to waste time trying to convince my colleagues."
"Commonsense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen."
"Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands."
"There is no substitute for hard work."
"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."
"46 Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
"Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants."