“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”

“Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!”

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”

“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.”

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”