The horizon of many people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call this their point of view.

The emotional state that leads to achievements resembles that of a worshiper or the lover.

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves. This ethical basis I call the ideal of the pigsty.

It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

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.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.