The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.

Despite my being an old gypsy there is a tendency to respectability inherent in old age.

When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that three of his fingers are pointing at himself. Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.

A ship is safe at shore but it's not built for that.

In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Compulsory military service seems to me the most disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering today.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds; they are thus in no wise logical consequences of the contents of these sense-experiences. If, therefore, we wish to grasp the essence of a complex of abstract notions we must for the one part investigate the mutual relationships between the concepts and the assertions made about them; for the other, we must investigate how they are related to the experiences.