It is important for the common good to foster individuality: for only the individual can produce the new ideas which the community needs for its continuous improvement and
requirements - indeed, to avoid sterility and petrification
I find it difficult to believe that I belong to such an idiotic, rotten species - the species that actually boasts of its freedom of will, heroism on command, senseless violence, and all of the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism.
It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature ... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, where the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.