Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Qualities I sought in a scientific theory were naturalness, inner perfection and logical simplicity from an aesthetic approach.
Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.
I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.
There are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views
Understanding of our fellow human beings...becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feelings in joy and sorrow.
One cannot help but be in awe when [one] contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.
Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown.
Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.
Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement.
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing...
I am not an atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
Israel is the only place on earth where Jews have the possibility to shape public life according to their own traditional ideals.
My comprehension of God comes from a deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world.
What the individual can do is to give a fine example, and to have the courage to uphold ethical values .. in a society of cynics.
Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.
If we think of the field as being removed, there is no 'space' which remains, since space does not have an independent existence.
My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by questions they couldn't answer.
Without changing our pattern of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought
This is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer.
Children don’t heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history. Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.
[C]reationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world ..., the most dangerous adversaries of science.
The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can’t grasp them. There is a pattern in creation.
Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.
Insofar as we may at all claim that slavery has been abolished today, we owe its abolition to the practical consequences of science
You teach me baseball and I'll teach you relativity...No we must not. You will learn about relativity faster than I learn baseball.
Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.
I think the appropriate response for a physicist is: 'I do not find the concept of God very interesting, because I cannot test it.'
The brain rewards us for interacting with beautiful things. In this way, evolution wants to encourage us to do what is good for us.
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the time passes.
Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.
Physics is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.
I am also convinced that one gains the purest joy from spirited things only when they are not tied in with earning one's livelihood.
The truth isn't always a blinding light. Sometimes it's a deep and dazzling darkness, that illuminates - and burns - just as surely.
The wing structure of the hornet, in relation to its weight, is not suitable for flight, but he does not know this and flies anyway.
It is an outcome of faith that nature-as she is perceptible to our five senses-takes the character of such a well formulated puzzle.
You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.
The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.
To obtain an assured favorable response from people, it is better to offer them something for their stomachs instead of their brains.
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way, but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
I have lived to prove Thoreau's contention that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
I am an absolute pacifist...It is an instinctive feeling. It is a feeling that possesses me, because the murder of men is disgusting.