Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, comically, they only wriggle about inside.

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.

Don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.