Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

I wouldn't want to live if I did not have my work. In any case, it's good that I'm already old and personally don't have to count on a prolonged future.

The state is made for man, not man for the state.... That is to say, the state should be our servant and not we its slaves

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as something that is considered to be independent of its being observed. In this sense one speaks of physical reality.