The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
…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.
A human being is a part of a 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 of nature in its beauty.
Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton:
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.
The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
