Albert Einstein Quotes
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"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." Albert Einstein
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish" Albert Einstein Quotes
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater"
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV "
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
"One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war"
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former"
"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding"
"There are problems in today's world that cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them"
"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."
* "I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but
World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones."
* "Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of
life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
One Liner and Famous Quotes by Einstein
* "God does not play dice with the universe."
* "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18."
* "When the solution is simple, God is answering."
* "Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes,
where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter
the realm of Art and Science."
* "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."
* "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."
* "Watch the stars, and from them learn. To the Master's honor all must turn,
each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton's ground."
* "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre
minds."
* "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
* "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not
sure about the former."
* "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but
an equation is something for eternity."
* "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."
* "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
* "Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through
understanding."
Einstein's Thoughts and Quotes About Life, Religion, and Science*
"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 behavior 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
spiritualization of our understanding of life".
*
"In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that
dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science
out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own
special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of
ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the
products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an
angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two
categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but
there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside"
*
"We all know, from what we experience with and within ourselves, that our
conscious acts spring from our desires and our fears. Intuition tells us that
that is true also of our fellows and of the higher animals. We all try to escape
pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant. We are all ruled in what we do
by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general
serve for our self-preservation and that of the race. Hunger, love, pain, fear
are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self
preservation. At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations
with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for
power, pity, and so on. All these primary impulses, not easily described in
words, are the springs of man's actions. All such action would cease if those
powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us. Though our conduct
seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts
are much alike in them and in us. The most evident difference springs from the
important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of
imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other
symbolical devices. Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between
the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions. In that way imagination
and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary
instincts. But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the
immediate claims of our instincts."
*
"The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times,
is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motional life of
man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic
forces in the individual?"
*
"When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is
too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the
weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.
Nevertheless, no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection
whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain
are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in
operation, not because of any lack of order in nature."
*
"We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the
realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the
rule of fixed necessity..... What is still lacking here is a grasp of the
connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself."
*
"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."
*
"I believe that the first step in the setting of a 'real external world' is the
formation of the concept of bodily objects and of bodily objects of various
kinds. Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and
arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly
in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense
experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the
bodily object. Considered logically this concept is not identical with the
totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of
the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and
its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we
associate with it."
*
"Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic
thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an
association as possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior
reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization. Science can
only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value
judgments of all kinds remain necessary."
*
"1. Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health
of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labor of all.
2. The satisfaction of physical needs is indeed the indispensable 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."
*
" During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that
there was an unrecognizable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion
prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced
increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was
superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the
sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the
school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end
exclusively."
*
"Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. If one
asks the whence derives the authority of fundamental ends, since they cannot be
stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a
healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and
aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as
something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their
existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through
revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt
to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
*
"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. But 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."
*
"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."
*
"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."
*
"I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the
measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it
is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not
looking at it."
*
"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in
time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something
separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of 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 the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a
substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."
*
"The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force
behind scientific research. No one who does not appreciate the terrific
exertions and above all, the devotion without which pioneer creations in
scientific thought cannot come into being, can judge the strength of the feeling
out of which alone such work, turned away as it is from immediate practical
life, can grow. What a deep faith in the rationality of the world and its
structure and what a longing to understand even the smallest glimpses of the
reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton ..."