I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.

Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.

no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.