The students at our universities have ceased as completely as their teachers to enshrine the hopes and ideals of the nation.

Young people especially like to contemplate bold projects. Also, it is natural for a serious young man to envision his desired goals with the greatest possible precision.

When I was a little boy my father showed me a small compass, and the enormous impression that it made on me certainly played a role in my life.

In the matter of physics [education], the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see.

It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak relatively late, so much so that they consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was then, certainly not less than three.

Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating beauty of the intellect for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong.

Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn the liberating beauty of the intellect for your own personal joy and for the profit of the community to which your later work will belong.

The aim (of education) must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who, however, can see in the service to the community their highest life achievement.

That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.

I do not much believe in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be.

Failure and deprivation are the best educators and purifiers.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.

An awareness of my limitations pervades me all the more keenly in recent times because my faculties have been quite overrated since a few consequences of general relativity theory have stood the test.

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault or merit of my own.

The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?

I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends, or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.