It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher.

How can any educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science.

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing - a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation E = mc², in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa.

There will come a point in everyone's life , however, where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why but one must accept intuition as a fact.

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.