"The Lord may be subtle, but He is not malicious."
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."
"Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hopes and desires,
where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to
contemplate, there we enter the realm of Art and of Science.
"If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of
logic, we are doing science. If we show it in forms whose interrelationships
are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intuitively recognized
as meaningful, we are doing art. Common to both is the devotion to something
beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary."
"Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts.
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail
in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive
them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
( When asked to describe radio )
"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. That's
relativity."
( When asked what his Theory of Relativity was by William Randolph Hearst's
mistress during a visit to Xanadu, the Hearst mansion. )
"Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."
"There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there."
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."
"I regard it as the chief duty of the state to protect the individual and give him the opportunity to develop into a creative personality; that is to say; the state should be our servant and not we its slaves."