I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.

What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.

Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations.

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.