This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

The Bible is a collection of honorable, but primitive legends which are still nevertheless pretty childish.

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.

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

The step between genius and insanity is very short.