I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.