What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.