Quotes to inspire and reflect

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.

The greatest invention of mankind is compound interest.

I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.

[ Remark to Philippe Halsman :] When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.

Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct anyway.

[ From an autobiographical handwritten note :] Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.

[ Response to being asked why people could discover atoms but not the means to control them :] That is simple, my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.

Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.

The most important aspect of our [Israel’s] policy must be our ever-present, manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens living in our midst. . . . The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.

It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late, so that they even consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was—but surely not less than three.

Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify. . . . This kind of inquisition violates the spirit of the Constitution. If enough people are ready to take this grave step they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.

[ On quantum theory :] It is hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that he would choose to play dice with the world . . . is something I cannot believe for a single moment.

I do not know [how the Third World War will be fought]. But I can tell you what they’ll use in the fourth—rocks!

We know nothing about it [God and the world] at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now. But the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never.

As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we shall have learned nothing from our 2,000 years of suffering and will deserve our fate.

Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster.

I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will , not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming-house, than a physicist.

Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice.

To-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire , the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!

I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.

According to the assumption considered here, in the propagation of a light ray emitted from a point source, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing volumes of space, but consists of a finite number of energy quanta localized at points of space that move without dividing and can be absorbed or generated only as complete units.

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.

[ Suggesting “hello” as a standard telephone greeting :] I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.

Here comes the story of the Hurricane,

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes

If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.

Mama, take this badge off of me

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.

Don’t follow leaders

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,

You don’t need a weather man

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Something is happening here

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,

The order is

Come senators, congressmen

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,

How many times can a man turn his head,

How many deaths will it take till he knows

Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it.

Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien .

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

Sundered by peaks unscalable,