Life and Existence

Life is short, and the boulder against which one pushes with all one’s might moves from its spot only with long intermissions.

Life is short, and the boulder against which one pushes with all one’s might moves from its spot only with long intermissions.

Autobiographies mostly arise out of narcissism or negative feelings toward others. Biographies from the pen of another person tend in their psychological traits to reflect the intellectual and spiritual nature of the writer more than that of the person portrayed.

I admit that thoughts influence the body.

I admit that thoughts influence the body.

It is better for people to be like the beasts… They should be more intuitive; they should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it.

Children don’t heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history. Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.

Life is a great tapestry. The individual is only an insignificant thread in an immense and miraculous pattern.

We will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.

Thus I came… to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true… Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience—an attitude which has never again left me.

A forced faithfulness is a bitter fruit for all concerned.

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

If one purges all subsequent additions from the original teachings of the Prophets and Christianity, especially those of the priests, one is left with a doctrine that is capable of curing all the social ills of humankind.

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence, for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of his children for their numerous stupidities, for which only he himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only his nonexistence could excuse him.

The scientist is possessed by a sense of universal causation… His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection… It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

The Jew who abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word) is in a position similar to a snail that abandons its shell. He remains a Jew.

I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to.

Like the man in the fairytale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything is turned into newspaper clamor.

I’ve been so preoccupied with what would happen in the event of my death that I’m surprised to find myself still alive.

I lived in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in maturity.

In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.

You are surprised, aren’t you, at the contrast between my fame throughout the world… and the isolation and quiet in which I live here. I wished for this isolation all my life, and now I have finally achieved it here in Princeton.

I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude—a feeling which increases over the years.