Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

At our age, the devil doesn’t give you much time off!

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else, unless it is an enemy.

Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

The really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

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

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and full in feeling.

On receiving Lord & Taylor Award: It gives me great pleasure, indeed, to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.

As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly important.

A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

The destiny of civilized humanity depends more than ever on the moral forces it is capable of generating.

I, an old man, greet you Japanese schoolchildren from afar and hope that your generation may some day put mine to shame.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.

Each of us has to do his little bit toward transforming this spirit of the times.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

When the solution is simple, God is answering.