Albert Einstein Quotes

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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.

Albert Einstein
Despite my being an old gypsy there is a tendency to respectability inherent in old age.

Albert Einstein
I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or State, to my circle of friends or even to my own family... Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it,to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.

Albert Einstein
The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-minded and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it.

Albert Einstein
When I think of the most able students I have encountered in my teaching - I mean those who have distinguished themselves not only by skill but by independence of thought - then I must confess that all have had a lively interest in epistemology.

Albert Einstein
It would of course be a great step forward if we succeeded in combining the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field into a single structure. Only so could the era in theoretical physics inaugurated by Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell be brought to a satisfactory close.

Albert Einstein
Specialization in almost all branches of human endeavor has, to be sure, resulted in unprecedented achievements - however, at the expense of narrowing the individual's field of vision. Thus it is hard nowadays to find anyone able to repair, properly, a garment, a piece of furniture, let alone a watch.

Albert Einstein
Non-cooperation in military matters should be an essential moral principle for all true scientists...

Albert Einstein
Physics is the attempt at the conceptual construction of a model of the real world and its lawful structure.

Albert Einstein
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.

Albert Einstein
The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim.

Albert Einstein
It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better.

Albert Einstein
That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.

Albert Einstein
Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order.... This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.

Albert Einstein
But the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.

Albert Einstein
How wretchedly inadequate is the theoretical physicist as he stands before Nature — and before his students!

Albert Einstein
It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak fairly late, so that they even consulted a doctor. I can't say how old I was - but surely not less than three.

Albert Einstein
One can only continue to expect to be read if one omits everything that is unimportant.

Albert Einstein
But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.

Albert Einstein
My faith in the reliability of the theory still fluctuates... Thus, if not all systems of equations of the theory... admit transformations other than linear ones, then the theory contradicts its own starting point and all is up in the air.

Albert Einstein
Of the general theory of relativity you will be convinced, once you have studied it. Therefore I am not going to defend it with a single word.

Albert Einstein
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.

Albert Einstein
It is a welcome symptom in an age which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose goals lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere.

Albert Einstein
If we have the courage to decide ourselves for peace we will have peace.

Albert Einstein
Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

Albert Einstein
There is one ray of hope. It seems to me that today the responsible leaders of the several peoples have, in the main, the honest will to abolish war.

Albert Einstein
It is the most beautiful reward for one who has striven his whole life to grasp some little bit of truth if he sees that other men have real understanding of and pleasure with his work.

Albert Einstein
Human nature always has tried to form for itself a simple and synoptic image of the surrounding world. In doing this it tries to construct a picture which will give some sort of tangible expression to what the human mind sees in nature.

Albert Einstein
We can only see the universe by the impressions of our senses reflecting indirectly the things of reality.

Albert Einstein
It seems that the human mind has first to construct forms independently before we can find them in things. Kepler's marvelous achievement is a particularly fine example of the truth that knowledge cannot spring from experience alone, but only from the comparison of the inventions of the mind with observed fact.

Albert Einstein