Albert Einstein Quotes
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Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
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As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents... I congratulate you on the great successes of your life's work.
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The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences.
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Any brief military advantage the USA might gain with nuclear weapons would be offset by political and psychological losses and damage to American prestige. The United States might even touch off a worldwide armaments race.
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To have security against atomic bombs and against the other biological weapons, we have to prevent war, for if we cannot prevent war every nation will use every means that is at their disposal; and in spite of all promises they make, they will do it. At the same time, so long as war is not prevented, all the governments of the nations have to prepare for war, and if you have to prepare for war, then you are in a state where you cannot abolish war.
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I believe my theory of relativity to be true. But it will only be proved for certain in 1981, when I am dead.
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I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however.
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If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. To him who is a discoverer in this field the products of his imagination appear so necessary and natural that he regards them, and would like to have them regarded by others, not as creations of thought but as given realities.
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However we select from nature a complex of phenomena using the criterion of simplicity, in no case will its theoretical treatment turn out to be forever appropriate (sufficient).... I do not doubt that the day will come when general relativity, too, will have to yield to another one, for reasons which at present we do not yet surmise. I believe that this process of deepening theory has no limits.
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Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.
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The environment is everything that isn't me.
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I do not believe in race as such. Race is a fraud. All modern people are the conglomeration of so many ethnic mixtures that no pure race remains.
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I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.
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Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
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I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.
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Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.
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If I hadn't an absolute faith in the harmony of creation, I wouldn't have tried for thirty years to express it in a mathematical formula. It is only man's consciousness of what he does with his mind that elevates him above the animals, and enables him to become aware of himself and his relationship to the universe.
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A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy.
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Capitalism creates a huge community of producers who are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor, and an oligarchy that cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized society....the subjugation is not by force but because the privileged class has long ago established a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.
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I believe serious progress in the abolition of war can be achieved only when men become organized on an international scale and refuse, as a body, to enter military or war service.
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Every reminiscence is colored by the way things are today, and therefore by a delusive point of view.
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I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you've given me the nomination I feel that I am one.
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Max Planck was one of the finest people I have ever known... but he really didn't understand physics, because during the eclipse of 1919 he stayed up all night to see if it would confirm the bending of light by the gravitational field. If he had really understood general relativity, he would have gone to bed the way I did.
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Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren't you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind - to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.