Quotes by Albert Einstein (Page 4 of 4)

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust.

Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.

The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.

Time is an illusion.

What I seek to accomplish is simply to serve with my feeble capacity truth and justice, at the risk of pleasing no one.

We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence for fighting for our cause, but by non-participation of anything you believe is evil.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is a miracle.

What counts can't always be counted; what can be counted doesn't always count.

It is a strange thing to be so widely known, and yet to be so lonely.

When I was young, all I wanted and expected from life was to sit quietly in some corner doing my work without the public paying attention to me. And now see what has become of me.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Nature rarely surrenders one of her magnificent secrets.

Look into nature, and then you will understand it better.

The most beautiful gift of nature is that it gives one pleasure to look around and try to comprehend what we see.

Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech.

Freedom, in any case, is only possible by constantly struggling for it.

Man is here for the sake of other men -- above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.

The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

The great moral teachers of humanity were in a way artistic geniuses in the art of living.

All I have is a sense of duty toward all people and an attachment to those with whom I have become intimate.

We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.

I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

The goal of pacifism is possible only though a supranational organization. To stand unconditionally for this cause is the criterion of true pacifism.

My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred.

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

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

It is the theory that decides what can be observed.

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

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.

I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

I believe that whatever we do or live for has its causality; it is good, however, that we cannot see through to it.

Compassionate people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security, and joy of humanity than the discoverers of knowledge.

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

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

Women always worry about things that men forget; men always worry about things women remember.

Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.

Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.

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

Never memorize something that you can look up.

The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest.

The value of achievement lies in the achieving.

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.

A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.

The search for truth is more precious than its possession.

I salute the man who is going through life always helpful, knowing no fear, and to whom aggressiveness and resentment are alien.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up.

I see my life in terms of music.

In art, and in the higher ranges of science, there is a feeling of harmony which underlies all endeavor. There is no true greatness in art or science without that sense of harmony.

Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.

Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.

I always get by best with my naivety, which is 20 percent deliberate.

Weak people revenge. Strong people forgive. Intelligent people ignore.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

A true genius admits that he or she knows nothing.

Full well do I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person should do the thinking and commanding.

Failure is success in progress.

Failure and deprivation are the best educators and purifiers.

When you trip over love, it is easy to get up. But when you fall in love, it is impossible to stand again.

Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not.

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

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

Common sense invents and constructs no less than its own field than science does in its domain. It is, however, in the nature of common sense not to be aware of this situation.

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

Never lose a holy curiosity.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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

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

There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

God always takes the simplest way.

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

To the Master's honor all must turn, each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton's ground.

God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.

Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

The environment is everything that isn't me.

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.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

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

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

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.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

I want to know all God's thoughts; all the rest are just details.

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

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

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

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

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

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

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

You can't blame gravity for falling in love.

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

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.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

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

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

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

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

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.