Albert Einstein Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Albert Einstein
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
In the case of the equations of gravitation it is the four-dimensionality and the symmetric tensor as expression for the structure of space that, together with the invariance with respect to the continuous transformation group, determine the equations all but completely.

Albert Einstein
Today we know that no approach which is founded on classical mechanics and electrodynamics can yield a useful radiation formula.

Albert Einstein
The theoretical scientist is compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by purely mathematical, formal considerations in his search for a theory, because the physical experience of the experimenter cannot lift him into the regions of highest abstraction.

Albert Einstein
People will not disarm step by step; they will disarm at one blow or not at all.

Albert Einstein
The strangest thing in all this medieval literature is the conviction that if there is a word there must also be a clear meaning behind it, and the only problem is to find out that meaning.

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

Albert Einstein
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. When visiting the U.S. from Germany for a winter academic stay.

Albert Einstein
It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

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
Michele [Besso] has left this strange world just before me. This is of no importance. For us convinced physicists the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.

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

Albert Einstein