Albert Einstein Quotes
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A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.
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Balance in large measure is knowing the things that can be changed, putting them in proper perspective, and recognizing the things that will not change.
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Ever since childhood I have scorned the commonplace limits so often set upon human ambition. Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone; best both for the body and the mind.
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By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what on has recognized to be true. It is evident that any restriction on academic freedom acts in such a way as to hamper the dissemination of knowledge among the people and thereby impedes national judgment and action.
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I do not believe that a moral philosophy can ever be founded on a scientific basis. … The valuation of life and all its nobler expressions can only come out of the soul’s yearning toward its own destiny. Every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulas must fail. Of that I am perfectly convinced.
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The only race I know is the human one.
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The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.
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God has given me a mule-like stubbornness to stick with a difficult problem and the intuitive powers to conceptualize complex hypothetical situations in my mind.
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The scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at 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 utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
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Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.
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Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.
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While it is true that an inherently free and scrupulous person may be destroyed, such an individual can never be enslaved or used as a blind tool.
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The State is made for Mankind, not mankind for the state.
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I always found I was in the best of company, alone.
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From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.
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It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus, for what is written in the Bible about him is poetically embellished.
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I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. Bu t my intellectual development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
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I hate all the loathsome nonsense that goes with patriotism.
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The wing structure of the hornet, in relation to its weight, is not suitable for flight, but he does not know this and flies anyway.
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A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.
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The theoretical idea ... does not arise apart from and independent of experience; nor can it be derived from experience by a purely logical procedure. It is produced by a creative act. Once a theoretical idea has been acquired, one does well to hold fast to it until it leads to an untenable conclusion.
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What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.
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The rest of my life (as a 39 year old) I want to reflect on what life is.
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Formerly, people thought that if matter disappeared from the universe, space and time would remain. Relativity declares that space and time would disappear with matter.