Albert Einstein Quotes

The importance of a problem should not be judged by the number of pages devoted to it.

Live life to the fullest. You have to color outside the lines once in a while if you want to make your life a masterpiece. Laugh some every day. Keep growing, keep dreaming, keep following your heart. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitter disappointment.

For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope.

There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.

As long as armies exist, any serious quarrel will lead to war.

If there is no price to be paid, it is also not of value.

If honey bees become extinct, human society will follow in four years.

Games are the most elevated form of investigation.

There can never be complete agreement on international control and the administration of atomic energy or on general disarmament until there is a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty. For as long as atomic energy and armaments are considered a vital part of national security no nation will give more than lip service to international treaties.

Beyond the realms of what we see, into the regions or the unexplored limited only by our imaginations.

Mankind must give up war in the Atomic Era. What is at stake is the life or death of humanity.

Every age has its beautiful moments.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen.

What I value in life is quality rather then quantity.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

Don't do anything that goes against your conscience, even if your country says so.

Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. Einstein's reply was I don't know, why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?

Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him ... In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.

Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.

Between the difficulties, one hides the opportunity

The genius is in making the complex simple.

My comprehension of God comes from a deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

A man's moral worth is not measured by what his religious beliefs are but rather by what emotional impulses he has received from Nature during his lifetime.

Political leaders or governments owe their position partly to force and partly to popular election. They cannot be regarded as representative of best elements, morally or intellectually, in their respective nations.

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.

Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown.

When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.

Time is just something we invented to make motion seem simple.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

I have no extraordinary ability. I'm simply an inquisitive individual.

Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.

Ninety nine failed solutions equals a gain of 99 pieces of information.

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.

There is no great discoveries and advances, as long as there is an unhappy child on earth. / Ne možemo govoriti o napretku čovječanstva, dok na svijetu ima nesretne djece.

Not until we dare to regard ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we gain the esteem of others, or rather only then will it come of its own accord

What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable.

The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge.

Communities tend to be guided less than individuals by conscience and a sense of responsibility. How much misery does this fact cause mankind! It is the source of wars and every kind of oppression, which fill the earth with pain, sighs and bitterness.

Democracy, taken in its narrower, purely political, sense, suffers from the fact that those in economic and political power possess the means for molding public opinion to serve their own class interests. The democratic form of government in itself does not automatically solve problems; it offers, however, a useful framework for their solution. Everything depends ultimately on the political and moral qualities of the citizenry.

It is not a lack of real affection that scares me away again and again from marriage. Is it a fear of the comfortable life, of nice furniture, of dishonor that I burden myself with, or even the fear of becoming a contented bourgeois.

It is an outcome of faith that nature-as she is perceptible to our five senses-takes the character of such a well formulated puzzle.

The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty and truth.

I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food.

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.

Non-comprehenders are often distressed. Not you, though-because with good humor you're blessed. After all, your thoughts went like this, I dare say: It was none but the Lord who made us that way.

Members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.

How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will.

How do I work? I grope.

You don't have to understand the world. You just have to find your own way around in it.

Future medicine will be the medicine of frequencies.

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

Genius is when an idea and the execution of that idea are simultaneous.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

To understand the world one must not be worrying about one's self.

Subtle is the Lord. Malicious, He is not.

The comprehensibility of the world seems to me a wonder or eternal secret. Here lies the sense of wonder which increases even more with the development of our knowledge.

There is a race between mankind and the universe. Mankind is trying to build bigger, better, faster, and more foolproof machines. The universe is trying to build bigger, better, and faster fools. So far the universe is winning.

The laws of gravity cannot be held responcible for people falling in love.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.

[I] must seek in the stars that which was denied [to me] on earth.

What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.

Since that deluge of newspaper articles I have been so flooded with questions, invitations, suggestions, that I keep dreaming I am roasting in Hell, and the mailman is the devil eternally yelling at me, showering me with more bundles of letters at my head because I have not answered the old ones.

With me every peep becomes a trumpet solo.

I never said half the crap people said I did.

Empty away your many thoughts to make room for more needed material instead of thoughts that we will never use. Einstein

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.
- Science and Religion (1941)

I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure.

As a child I received instruction in both the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

Mysticism is in fact the only criticism people cannot level against my theory.

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.

Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do - but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.

We must learn to see the world anew.

If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.

But in physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examination, whether one liked it or not.

I believe my theory of relativity to be true. But it will only be proved for certain in 1981, when I am dead.

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.

All means prove but blunt instruments, if they have not behind them a living spirit.

The world needs heroes and it's better they be harmless men like me than villains like Hitler

Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.

The music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it - that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.

Check out not to become a man or woman of achievement, but instead seek to become a particular person of price.

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?

What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians?

We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.

I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will not only its moment to jump off but its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.

The desire for truth must take precedence over all other desires.

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

What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.

When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.