My God may not be your idea of God, but one thing I know of my God he makes me a humanitarian. I am a proud Jew because we gave the world the Bible and the story of Joseph.
Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of the striving for the wish fulfillment of material kinds. The goal is to raise the spiritual values of society.
Is there not a certain satisfaction in the fact that natural limits are set to the life of the individual, so that at the conclusion it may appear as a work of art?
The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ... [By seeking] logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.
I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense... Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.
The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation (...)The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. This is a normal social reaction. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world... the root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity.