I prefer to make up my own quotes and attribute them to very smart people, so that I can use them to win arguments

The single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe the universe is friendly.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. When visiting the U.S. from Germany for a winter academic stay.

Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

I can't stand clutter. I can't stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.

Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll.... It does not mean that everything in life is relative.

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Only six men in the world know about relativity. I am not one of them. When I ask them to explain, they confused me.

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it.

I became more and more convinced that even nature could be understood as a relatively simple mathematical structure.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

The dog is very smart. He feels sorry for me because I receive so much mail; that's why he tries to bite the mailman.

Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.

A scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers a mistake of others.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.

Growth comes through analogy; through seeing how things connect, rather than only seeing how they might be different.

Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot

Each of us visits this Earth involuntarily, and without an invitation. For me, it is enough to wonder at the secrets.

We must recognize what in our accepted tradition is damaging to our fate and dignity-and shape our lives accordingly.

The world is an evil place to live in. Not for those who do evil, but for those who sit back and allow evil to occur.

I’ve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

We know that if supersymmetric particles exist, they must be very heavy; otherwise we would have spotted them by now.

I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy-- of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

Sometimes the answer to fear does not lie in trying to explain away the causes, sometimes the answer lies in courage.

The height of stupidity is most clearly demonstrated by the individual who ridicules something he knows nothing about.

Imagination without knowledge may create beautiful things, knowledge without imagination can create only perfect ones.

It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

It is not so important where one settles down. The best thing is to follow your instincts without too much reflection.

How can any educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science.

To the extent math refers to reality, we are not certain to the extent we are certain, math does not refer to reality.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.

What I seek to accomplish is simply to serve with my feeble capacity truth and justice, at the risk of pleasing no one.

The most important method of education always has consisted of that in which the pupil was urged to actual performance.

My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.

What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers.

New frameworks are like climbing a mountain - the larger view encompasses rather than rejects the more restricted view.

Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do - but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.

Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it.

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

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