Albert Einstein Quotes
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The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. However, I am also not a "Freethinker" in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition. My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insuffiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature." It is this consciousness and humility I miss in the Freethinker mentality.
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I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people 'can' or 'cannot' observe. One would have to say 'only what we observe exists,' which is obviously false.
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To see with one's own eyes, to feel and judge without succumbing to the suggestive power of the fashion of the day, to be able to express what one has seen and felt in a snappy sentence or even in a cunningly wrought word - is that not glorious? Is it not a proper subject for congregation?
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To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.
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America is today the hope of all honorable men who respect the rights of their fellow men and who believe in the principle of freedom and justice.
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Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition.
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It is my belief that the problem of bringing peace to the world on a supranational basis will be solved only by employing Gandhi's method on a larger scale.
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I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food.
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I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty.
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I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.
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I am very smart. But not as strong-hearted as all the workers on earth for he toils endlessly and does it all to feed his family while I do it merely for solving an impossible puzzle.
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Scarcely anyone who comprehends this theory can escape its magic.
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The enormous mental resilience, without which no Chess player can exist, was so much taken up by Chess that he could never free his mind of this game.
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In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god.
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The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispensable pre-condition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself it is not enough. In order to be content, men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accords with their personal characteristics and abilities.
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Dear Habicht, Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential babble... What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul...?
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The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.
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How do I work? I grope.
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The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those 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.
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God is a scientist, not a magician.
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Just as with the man in the fairy tale who turned whatever he touched into gold, with me everything is turned into newspaper clamor.
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The creative principle of science resides in mathematics.
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The greatest activity of which man is capable: Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.
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The longing to behold this pre-established harmony of phenomena and theoretical principles, is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself ...