Of what significance is one's existence, one is basically unaware. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life? The bitter and the sweet come from outside. The hard from within, from one's own efforts. For the most part I do what my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn such respect and love for it.
The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.
The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes.