I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

It is a precarious undertaking to say anything reliable about aims and intentions.

To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it.

Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, where the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.

Only the [Catholic] Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.