“See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is.”

“One must seek another certitude beyond the world, beyond the homeland; one must refuse to join the chorus of the demoniacal and create one’s own homeland, one’s own world, outside the present time.”

“The world existed for me only in relationship to you.”

“A new world suddenly opened up on the printed page before me, the words moved vigorously towards me as if they had been seeking me for centuries...”

“But you wouldn’t believe what a dead finger does to a living hand.”

“The woman has a dangerous decision to confront, whether she will live her own life, or that of her children, whether she will be a woman first or a mother first.”

“had he been only a hardworking craftsman all his life, fitting colours together as a labourer constructs a building out of stones?”

“the soul cannot remain at peace when the world beyond is in uproar.”

“You don't run amok for long with impunity, you're bound to be struck down in the end...”

“Het was fantastisch te leven in deze stad die gastvrij alles wat vreemd was opnam en zich graag gaf,”

“I wanted to go back over what I had so fleetingly experienced step by step, relishing in retrospect by virtue of that magical self-deception we call memory.”

“Whether we do it or not, we’ll have to see—but still, just to have an idea, to think it through, work it out, and calculate the alternatives down to the ultimate consequences, that’ll be a pleasure I’d never expected to have.”

“It is my opinion that you should lend yourself to others and give yourself only to yourself.”

“the beauty of the creative gesture is wild, unwilling and painful.”

“great creative gifts do not mean fulness and giving out of abundance. On the contrary the expression is that of one who seeks help and strives to emancipate himself.”

“Dare to be naïve.”

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”

“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked”

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

“Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.”

“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do,

“I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.”

“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”

“Dare to be naive.”

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”

“Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering”

“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”

“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”

“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.”

“Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.”

“It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”

“Either war is obsolete or men are. ”

“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”

“I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.”

“There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.”

“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred—ergo, highly secure—lifelong position.”

“Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.”

“God is a verb”

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”

“Integrity is the essence of everything successful.”

“The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended”

“...primarily the individual is going to study at home.”

“Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.”

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”