Einstein says

"When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe,

he doesn't realize that the track he has covered is curved.

I was lucky enough to have spotted it."

"I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."

"It's not that I'm so smart , it's just that I stay with problems longer ."

“Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe.

But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help in the greatest of all causes

-- goodwill among men and peace on earth.”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber."

"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music.

I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I get most joy in life out of music."

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...

the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.”

Einstein says 2

“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.”

“The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.”

"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others ."

"I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details.."

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."

"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within."

"My life is a simple thing that would interest no one.

It is a known fact that I was born and that is all that is necessary."

"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue."

"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."

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

Einstein says 3

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited

in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as

something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his

consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to

our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our

task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of

compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its

beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such

achievement is in itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner

security"

"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world;

he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life,

in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."

"Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty ."

"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."

"The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play

and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society.

Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province."

"To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority.

Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject."

"One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life.

The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community."

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."

“ The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds.”

"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not.

This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination,

I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The only source of knowledge is experience"

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."

Einstein says 4

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.

It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.

Never lose a holy curiosity."

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.

The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly

submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"There are only two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle."

"The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat."

"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."

"A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy."

"Only a life lived for others is a life worth while ."

"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others."

Einstein says 6

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master.

For this reason mastery demands all of a person."

"(1) Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labour of all.

(2) The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indespensible precondition of a satisfactory existence, but in itself is not enough. In order to be content men must also have the possibility of developing their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent accord with their personal characteristics and abilities."

“ Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion toward men and toward objective things.”

"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."

"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."

“How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"

"Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love"

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."

Einstein says 7

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."

"Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man."

Einstein on religion 1

"The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat."

"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very

imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a

genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism"

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the

prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such

opinions."

"Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man."

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are

directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

"The 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. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behaviour on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress .... If it is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover (the) rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number

of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational

unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusion. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain, is moved by the profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason, incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious in the highest sense of the word. And so it

seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its

anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualisation of our understanding of life."

"I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe." or sometimes quoted as "God does not play dice with the universe."

"I 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. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiratation of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our we ak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

Morality is of the highest importance -- but for us, not for God."

"If the possibility of the spiritual development of all individuals is to be secured, a second kind of outward freedom is necessary. The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may be characterised as inward freedom. It is this freedom of the spirit which consists in the interdependence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general. This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy object for the individual."

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."