EINSTEIN Quotes

born March 1879, Ulm, Germany died April 1955, Princeton, N.J., US

20 One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest effort. -- Albert Einstein

48 Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover, by means of purely mathematical constructions, those concepts and those lawful connections between them which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience remains, of course, the sole criteria of physical utility of a mathematical construction. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed. Albert Einstein

92 Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein

93 The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery even if mixed with fear that engendered religion. A knowledge of something we can not penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes its creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, 1931

94 Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

95 I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings. Albert Einstein

139 I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, and even my immediate family with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude--feelings which increase with the years. Albert Einstein writing in 1930 (aged 51)

436 When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. -- A. Einstein

509

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. Albert Einstein

524

Everything is emptiness and form is condensed emptiness. Albert Einstein

547 A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. Albert Einstein

589 Still there are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. -- Albert Einstein

627 I only had two original ideas in my life, and one of them was wrong. -- Albert Einstein

675 One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike and yet it is the most precious thing we have. Albert Einstein

773 We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense. There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality. Albert Einstein

898 The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. Albert Einstein

899 My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I gang my own gait and 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 an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude a feeling which increases with the years. Albert Einstein

1100 To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself. Albert Einstein

1101 Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple,and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. Albert Einstein

1102 Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. Albert Einstein

1103 It may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has observed. But on principle it is quite wrong to try grounding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which determines what we can observe.

 Albert Einstein

1104 The most incomprehensible thing about the World is that it is comprehensible. Albert Einstein

1105 Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality. Albert Einstein, 1921

1106 Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein

1107 For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one. Albert Einstein

1108 Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the Self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest. Albert Einstein

1109 I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. Albert Einstein

1110 Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things. Albert Einstein

1111 Our experience justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. Albert Einstein

1112 What are socks? They only produce holes. Albert Einstein

1113 Every possession is a stone around the leg. Albert Einstein

1114 Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. Albert Einstein

1115 When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity. Albert Einstein

1116

[The scientist's] religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement of the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. Albert Einstein

1117 As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly significant. Albert Einstein

1118 Body and soul are not two different things, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by systematic thought. Albert Einstein

1119 As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. If such humility cold be conveyed to everybody, the world of human activities would be more appealing. Albert Einstein

1120 After World War 3 the next world war will be fought with stones. Albert Einstein

1121 The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely of mathematical or experimental skill, To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. Albert Einstein

1122

Of all the communities available to us there is not one that I would want to devote myself to, except for the society of the true seekers, which has very living members at any time... . Albert Einstein

1123 If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies. Albert Einstein

1124 time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live. Albert Einstein

1125 Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by pure logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Albert Einstein

1126 Nothing truly valuable can be achieved except by the disinterested cooperation of many individuals. Albert Einstein

1127 It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term scientific truth. Thus the meaning of the word truth varies according to whether we deal with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition, or a scientific theory. Religious truth conveys nothing clear to me at all. Albert Einstein

1128 It is the certainty by which we are so much impressed in mathematics. But this certainty is purchased at the price of emptiness of content. Concepts can only acquire content when they are connected, however indirectly. With

sensible experience. But no logical investigation can reveal this connection; it can only be experienced. And yet it is this connection that determines the cognitive value of systems of concepts. Albert Einstein

1129 The only justification for our concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. Albert Einstein

1130 The supreme task is to arrive at these universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience can reach them... Albert Einstein

1131 The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense which he has attained to liberation from the self. Albert Einstein

1132 In the interest of science it is necessary over and over again to engage in the critique of these fundamental concepts, in order that we may not be unconsciously rules by them. Albert Einstein, (1954)

1133 There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations in short, by metaphysics. I believe that every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter pure a positivist he may fancy himself. The metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that not all that is logically simple is embodied in experienced reality, but that the totality of all sensory

experience can be comprehended on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a miracle creed. Admittedly, but it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science. Albert Einstein

1169 Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination. Albert Einstein

1187 Imagination is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein [Ed Strachar, a motivational teacher, notes that many people know about this Einstein quote but do not know why Einstein said so. And the answer is that knowledge is about the past, imagination about the future. (BCS)]