From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.
In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.
Nobody knows how the stand of our knowledge about the atom would be without him. Personally, [Niels] Bohr is one of the amiable colleagues I have met. He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes himself to be in possession of the truth.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it.
It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.
Conversation with a friend will only bear good fruit of knowledge when both think only of the matter under consideration and forget that they are friends.