Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence.

Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.

We relate to Leonardo da Vinci because his genius was just being passionately curious about everything. He wanted to know everything he could know about our universe, including how we fit into it. We can't all have a superhuman intellect like Albert Einstein's, but we can be super-curious. And we can also quit smashing curiosity out of the hands our children.

Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.