As I See It.

"My passionate sense of social justice & social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings & human communities. I am truly a lone traveler, & have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance & a need for solitude - feelings which increase within the years. One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding & consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence & unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, & judgements of his fellows & avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations."

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art & true science. Whoever does not know it & can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, & his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that endangered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason & the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds - it is this knowledge & this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, & this alone, I am a truly religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards or punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life & with the awareness & a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."