Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

[There is] a duty in refusing to cooperate in any undertaking that violates the Constitutional rights of the individual. This holds in particular for all inquisitions that are concerned with the private life and the political affiliations of the citizens.

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

It is not a lack of real affection that scares me away again and again from marriage. Is it a fear of the comfortable life, of nice furniture, of dishonor that I burden myself with, or even the fear of becoming a contented bourgeois.

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

To get to know a country, you must have direct contact with the earth. It's futile to gaze at the world through a car window.

To invent something, all you need is imagination and a big pile of junk.