Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in the silence, and the truth comes to me.

I never thought that others would take my theories so much more seriously than I did.

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.

We have to do the best we are capable of. This is our sacred human responsibility.

The trite objects of human efforts-possessions, superficial success, luxury-have always seemed contemptible to me.

What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians?