My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems give me work give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

The true spirit of delight the exaltation the sense of being more than Man which is the touchstone of the highest excellence is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Humanism: an exaltation of freedom but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

The universal human laws - need love for the beloved fear hunger periodic exaltation the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant predictable reliable universal and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

Wishful thinking is not idealism. It is self-indulgence at best and self-exaltation at worst. In either case it is usually at the expense of others. In other words it is the opposite of idealism.