“I am not mine.You are not yours.No one can be his own.I am not yours.You are not mine.No one can belong to another.”

“If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty—by forms, I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are “true,” that they reveal a genuine feature of nature…. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.”

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.”

“Hat das Virus - welches auch immer - erst einmal alle befallen, darf man es nicht mehr Virus nennen. Am Anfang ja, am Anfang hat man jede Menge von Verbündeten. Je mehr der Strom aber anschwillt, je selbstverständlicher, je närrischer, je diktatorischer er sich gebärdet, um so mehr fallen um und hinein, und ich stehe belämmert am Ufer, und das letzte, was sie mir zubrüllen, im Chor, sind die Worte: »Nur wer sich ändert, bleibt sich treu!«, und unsereins steht als verkalkter Sack am Ufer.”

“Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us.I am still not capable – or rather unwilling – to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere.(on the passing of Amos Vogel, his friend for more than 45 years)”

“A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.”

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”