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. (Reading this makes me wonder how much sooner man could have walked on the moon... had we listened to a child's fantasies. It is truly a pity that so many lose their gift of imagination to the steady hum of the status quo.)
Albert EinsteinIf I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it too.
Albert EinsteinJust as with the man in the fairy tale who turned whatever he touched into gold, with me everything is turned into newspaper clamor.
Albert EinsteinReading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert EinsteinIt is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.
Albert EinsteinAnyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.
Albert EinsteinBut the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
Albert EinsteinTo dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.
Albert EinsteinAn attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere.
Albert EinsteinTo be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.
Albert EinsteinThe contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation (...)The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has shown itself reliable, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
Albert EinsteinUnderstanding of our fellow human beings...becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feelings in joy and sorrow.
Albert EinsteinThe Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
Albert EinsteinScientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.
Albert EinsteinI cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God.
Albert EinsteinOne has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. ... I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.
Albert EinsteinNew frameworks are like climbing a mountain - the larger view encompasses rather than rejects the more restricted view.
Albert EinsteinThe unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Albert EinsteinWell-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.
Albert EinsteinIt is impossible to solve significant problems using the same knowledge that created them.
Albert EinsteinThe ordinary adult never gives a thought to space-time problems ... I, on the contrary, developed so slowly that I did not begin to wonder about space and time until I was an adult. I then delved more deeply into the problem than any other adult or child would have done.
Albert EinsteinI am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.
Albert EinsteinIf you can't explain what you are doing to a nine-year-old, then either you still don't understand it very well, or it's not all that worthwile in the first place.
Albert EinsteinIf A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut
Albert EinsteinThey come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.
Albert EinsteinIf there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.
Albert EinsteinAlthough words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background.
Albert EinsteinWhoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.
Albert EinsteinThe more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events.
Albert Einstein