Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text. - Abraham Pais

One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you.

he described his own ideals, the desire for fulfillment not just as a theorist but also as an experimental physicist. (In the second respect, he, of course, never matched Newton.)

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane