The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.

The main task of the spirit is to free man from his ego.

Princeton is a wonderful little spot. A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts.

It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.