Great Throughts Treasury

"There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats."

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

"There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case."

"There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap."

"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."

"There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance."

"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."

"There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair."

"There is nothing known as Perfect. It"

"There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me."

"There remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion."

"There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation."

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."

"This is a question too difficult for a mathematician. It should be asked of a philosopher (when asked about completing his income tax form)"

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

"This world is a dangerous place to live, not because people are evil, but because the people did not care."

"Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labor of all."

"Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act."

"Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."

"Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed."

"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."

"Time is an illusion."

"Time is what prevents everything from happening at once."

"To be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must above all be a sheep."

"To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone."

"To get to know a country, you must have direct contact with the earth. It's futile to gaze at the world through a car window."

"To invent something, all you need is imagination and a big pile of junk."

"To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything."

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."

"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science."

"To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious."

"To the Master's honor all must turn, each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton's ground."

"To understand the world one must not be worrying about one's self."

"Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars."

"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."

"True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist."

"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. But, regarding the universe, I have not yet acquired absolute certainty. "

"War cannot be humanized, it can only be abolished."

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

"We all know that light travels faster than sound. That's why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak."

"We all know that, so why complain? Was it not always thus and will it not always thus remain? Certainly, and one must take what nature gives as one finds it. But there is also such a thing as a spirit of the times, an attitude of mind characteristic of a particular generation, which is passed on from individual to individual and gives its distinctive mark to a society. Each of us has to his little bit toward transforming this spirit of the times."

"We are all life trying to live, among other life trying to live."

"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books . It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranges and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

"We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them"

"We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings."

"We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams."

"We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of 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."

"We know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all, for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends."

"We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know."