“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

“He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

“Es gibt zwei Arten sein Leben zu leben: entweder so, als wäre nichts ein Wunder, oder so, als wäre alles eines. Ich glaube an Letzteres.”

“Everyone must become their own person, however frightful that may be.”

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. ”

“The only difference between genius and insanity is that genius has its limits.”

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”

“Never memorize something that you can look up.”

“Excellence is doing a common thing in an uncommon way.”

“The tendencies we have mentioned are something new for America. They arose when, under the influence of the two World Wars and the consequent concentration of all forces on a military goal, a predominantly military mentality developed, which with the almost sudden victory became even more accentuated. The characteristic feature of this mentality is that people place the importance of what Bertrand Russell so tellingly terms “naked power” far above all other factors which affect the relations between peoples. The Germans, misled by Bismarck’s successes in particular, underwent just such a transformation of their mentality—in consequence of which they were entirely ruined in less than a hundred years. I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I know that, independent of me, this analogy has most painfully occurred to others as well. It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered as unimportant and secondary. Herein lies a certain resemblance to Marxism, at least insofar as its theoretical side alone is kept in view. The individual is degraded to a mere instrument; he becomes “human materiel.” The normal ends of human aspiration vanish with such a viewpoint. Instead, the military mentality raises “naked power” as a goal in itself—one of the strangest illusions to which men can succumb.”

“Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will.”

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think”