What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!

A great thought begins by seeing something differently, with a shift of the mind's eye.

Whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.

Am I, or the others crazy?

We cannot resolve the problems of the world by unsing the same techniques that have created them.

Unless the cause of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed.

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