I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive.

For scientific endeavor is a natural whole the parts of which mutually support one another in a way which, to be sure, no one can anticipate.

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. (Reading this makes me wonder how much sooner man could have walked on the moon... had we listened to a child's fantasies. It is truly a pity that so many lose their gift of imagination to the steady hum of the status quo.)

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.