Albert Einstein Quotes

789 Sourced Quotes

It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw comfort from Lessing's fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.

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

Albert Einstein
If a body releases the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass is decreased by L/V2

Albert Einstein
At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.

Albert Einstein
For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly trustworthy physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whither they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.

Albert Einstein
Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.

Albert Einstein
Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

Albert Einstein
The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. However, I am also not a "Freethinker" in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition. My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature." It is this consciousness and humility I miss in the Free-thinker mentality.

Albert Einstein
Dear mother! Today a joyful notice. H. A. Lorentz has telegraphed me that the English expeditions have really proven the deflection of light at the sun.

Albert Einstein
The God Spinoza revered is my God, too: I meet Him everyday in the harmonious laws which govern the universe. My religion is cosmic, and my God is too universal to concern himself with the intentions of every human being. I do not accept a religion of fear; My God will not hold me responsible for the actions that necessity imposes. My God speaks to me through laws.

Albert Einstein
I am very happy with my new home in friendly America and in the liberal atmosphere of Princeton.

Albert 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.

Albert Einstein
Matter is real to my senses, but they aren't trustworthy. If Galileo or Copernicus had accepted what they saw, they would never have discovered the movement of the earth and planets.

Albert Einstein
The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.

Albert Einstein
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

Albert Einstein
There has been an earth for a little more than a billion years. As for the question of the end of it I advise: Wait and see!

Albert Einstein
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.

Albert Einstein
I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of life and the joy of work harmoniously combined. Added to this is the spirit of ambition which pervades your very being, and seems to make the day's work like a happy child at play.

Albert Einstein
Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

Albert Einstein
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence — these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.

Albert Einstein
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future.

Albert Einstein
In order to be a perfect member of a flock of sheep, one has to be, foremost, a sheep.

Albert Einstein
There is only one road to human greatness: through the school of hard knocks.

Albert Einstein
One has to divide one's time between politics and our equations. Equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while... an equation is for eternity.

Albert Einstein
A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.

Albert Einstein
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.

Albert Einstein
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.

Albert Einstein
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.

Albert Einstein
This is the reason why all attempts to obtain a deeper knowledge of the foundations of physics seem doomed to me unless the basic concepts are in accordance with general relativity from the beginning. This situation makes it difficult to use our empirical knowledge, however comprehensive, in looking for the fundamental concepts and relations of physics, and it forces us to apply free speculation to a much greater extent than is presently assumed by most physicists.

Albert Einstein
A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
Sometimes quoted as: We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

Albert Einstein