Albert Einstein Quotes

788 Sourced Quotes

The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can't grasp them. There is a pattern in creation.

Albert Einstein
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. 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 each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. … Don't stop to marvel.

Albert Einstein
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein
Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle. Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.

Albert Einstein
The work on satisfactory formulation of technical patents was a true blessing for me. It compelled me to be many-sided in thought, and also offered important stimulation for thought about physics. Following a practical profession is a blessing for people of my type. Because the academic career puts a young person in a sort of compulsory situation to produce scientific papers in impressive quantity, a temptation to superficiality arises that only strong characters are able to resist.

Albert Einstein
Freedom of teaching and of opinion in book or press is the foundation for the sound and natural development of any people.

Albert Einstein
It is really a puzzle what drives one to take one's work so devilishly seriously.

Albert Einstein
I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.

Albert Einstein
Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as 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.

Albert Einstein
Dimensionless constants in the laws of nature, which from the purely logical point of view can just as well have different values, should not exist.

Albert Einstein
I would absolutely refuse any direct or indirect war service and would try to persuade my friends to do the same, regardless of the reasons for the cause of a war.

Albert Einstein
On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

Albert Einstein
That this insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr's unique instinct and sensitivity to discover the principal laws of the spectral lines and of the electron shell of the atoms, together with their significance for chemistry appeared to me as a miracle - and appears to me a miracle even today.

Albert Einstein
The basis of all scientific work is the conviction that the world is an ordered and comprehensive entity, which is a religious sentiment. My religious feeling is a humble amazement at the order revealed in the small patch of reality to which our feeble intelligence is equal.

Albert Einstein
For me it is not dubious that our thinking goes on for the most part without use of signs (words) and beyond that to a considerable degree unconsciously. For how, otherwise, should it happen that sometimes we "wonder" quite spontaneously about some experience? This "wondering" seems to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts which is already sufficiently fixed in us. Whenever such a conflict is experienced hard and intensively it reacts back upon our thought world in a decisive way. The development of this thought world is in a certain sense a continuous flight from "wonder."

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

Albert Einstein
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. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

Albert Einstein
Make a lot of walks to get healthy and don't read that much but save yourself some until you're grown up.

Albert Einstein
But to return to the Jewish question. Other groups and nations cultivate their individual traditions. There is no reason why we should sacrifice ours. Standardization robs life of its spice. To deprive every ethnic group of its special traditions is to convert the world into a huge Ford plant. I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.

Albert Einstein
A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression which classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that, within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown (for the special attention of those who are skeptics on principle).

Albert Einstein
The general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations which hold good for all the systems of co-ordinates, that is, are co-variant with respect to any substitutions whatever (generally co-variant).

Albert Einstein
As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our sensual experiences".

Albert Einstein
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else—unless it is an enemy.

Albert Einstein
The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified. To be sure, nature distributes her gifts variously among her children. But there are plenty of the well-endowed ones too, thank God, and I am firmly convinced that most of them live quiet, unregarded lives.

Albert Einstein