Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.

The only writers who have any peace are the ones who don't write. And there are some like that. They wallow in a sea of possibilities. To express a thought, you first have to limit it, and that means kill it. Every word I speak robs me of a thousand others, and every line I write means giving up another.

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?

You believe by doubting and you doubt by believing; yet this state too is not the final one.