All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

Faith: a firm belief for which there is no evidence.

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.

The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think, and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion.