If the State does not acquire supremacy over [vast private] enterprises, it becomes their puppet, and they become the real State.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.