The greatest activity of which man is capable: Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind... life would have seemed to me empty.

Most people go on living their everyday life: half-frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghostly tragic-comedy that is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world.

Is there not a certain satisfaction in the fact that natural limits are set to the life of the individual, so that at the conclusion it may appear as a work of art?

We scientists, whose tragic destination has been to help in making the methods of annihilation more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented.

e idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. However, I am also not a "Freethinker" in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition. My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insuffiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature." It is this consciousness and humility I miss in the Freethinker mentality. Sincerely yours, Albert Einstein.

It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature ... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.