I see my life in terms of music.

I am content in my later years. I have kept my good humor and take neither myself nor the next person seriously.

Thanks to my fortunate idea of introducing the relativity principle into physics, you (and others) now enormously overrate my scientific abilities, to the point where this makes me quite uncomfortable.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves. This ethical basis I call the ideal of the pigsty.

Certainly there are things worth believing. I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can't. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a leap—call it intuition or what you will—and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.

The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery