A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.

Language was invented to ask questions.

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.

One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure