Things are beautiful if you love them.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

The most valuable thing a teacher can impart to children is not knowledge and understanding per se but a longing for knowledge and understanding, and an appreciation for intellectual values, whether they be artistic, scientific, or moral.

Today also there is an urge toward social progress, toward tolerance and freedom of thought, toward a larger political unity… But the students at our universities have ceased as completely as their teachers to embody the hopes and ideals of the people.

Studying, and striving for truth and beauty in general, is a sphere in which we are allowed to be children throughout life.

On education: 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; it is that education which in the main is founded upon the desire for successful activity and acknowledgment.

Be creative, but make sure that what you create is not a curse for mankind.

Each of us visits this Earth involuntarily, and without an invitation. For me, it is enough to wonder at the secrets.

A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.

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.

Many times a day I realize how much my outer and inner life is based upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how much I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

Desire for approval and recognition is a healthy motive, but the desire to be acknowledged as better, stronger or more intelligent than a fellow being or fellow scholar easily leads to an excessively egoistic psychological adjustment.

Of course, understanding of our fellow-beings is important. But this understanding becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feeling in joy and in sorrow. The cultivation of this most important spring of moral action is that which is left of religion when it has been purified of the elements of superstition.

There is far too great a disproportion between what one is and what others think one is, or at least what they say they think one is. But one has to take it all with good humor.

I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

When I was young, all I wanted and expected from life was to sit quietly in some corner doing my work without the public paying attention to me.

On how he sees himself: A person with no roots anywhere…a stranger everywhere.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

All of one’s contemporaries and aging friends are living in a delicate balance, and one feels that one’s own consciousness is no longer as brightly lit as it once was. But then, twilight with its more subdued colors has its charms as well.

Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.

Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.