Albert Einstein Quotes

789 Sourced Quotes

Science has brought forth this danger, but the real problem is in the minds and hearts of men. We will change hearts of other men [only] by changing our own hearts and speaking bravely.

Albert Einstein
Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals.

Albert Einstein
I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.

Albert Einstein
Your exposition is of matchless clarity and perspicuity. You did not dodge any problems but took the bull by the horns, said all that is essential, and omitted all that is inessential.

Albert Einstein
Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a "positivist" he may fancy himself.

Albert Einstein
Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of the striving for the wish fulfillment of material kinds. The goal is to raise the spiritual values of society.

Albert Einstein
Out yonder there was this huge world...which stands before us like a great eternal riddle.

Albert Einstein
All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question "What are light quanta?" Nowadays every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.

Albert Einstein
For the scientist, there is only "being," but no wishing, no valuing, no good, no evil — in short, no goal. As long as we remain within the realm of science proper, we can never encounter a sentence of the type: "Thou shalt not lie."

Albert Einstein
Is there not a certain satisfaction in the fact that natural limits are set to the life of the individual, so that at the conclusion it may appear as a work of art?

Albert Einstein
I believe in mystery and, frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate, and that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life only in a very primitive form. Only in relation to these mysteries do I consider myself to be a religious man....

Albert Einstein
[I] must seek in the stars that which was denied [to me] on earth.

Albert Einstein
The comprehensibility of the world seems to me a wonder or eternal secret. Here lies the sense of wonder which increases even more with the development of our knowledge.

Albert Einstein
In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Compulsory military service seems to me the most disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering today.

Albert Einstein
A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.

Albert Einstein
Every physicist thinks that he knows what a photon is.... I spent my life to find out what a photon is and I still don't know it.

Albert Einstein
The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes.

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
Every physical concept must be given a definition such that one can in principle describe, in virtue of this definition, whether or not it applies in each particular case.

Albert Einstein
I could say analogously that tolerance is the affable appreciation of qualities, views, and actions of other individuals which are foreign to one s own habits, beliefs, and tastes. Thus being tolerant does not mean being indifferent towards the actions and feelings of others. Understanding and empathy must also be present....

Albert Einstein
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.

Albert Einstein
The normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling.

Albert Einstein
Strange that science, which in the old days seemed harmless, should have evolved into a nightmare that causes everyone to tremble.

Albert Einstein
In every naturalist there must be a kind of religious feeling; for he cannot imagine that the connections into which he sees have been thought of by him for the first time. He rather has the feeling of a child, over whom a grown-up person rules.

Albert Einstein
You cannot love a car the way you love a horse. The horse brings out human feelings the way machines cannot do. Things like machines may develop or neglect certain things in people... Machines make our life impersonal and stultify certain elements in us and create an impersonal environment.

Albert Einstein
The fact that in science we have to be content with an incomplete picture of the physical universe is not due to the nature of the universe itself but rather to us.

Albert Einstein
Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.

Albert Einstein
It is only to the individual that a soul is given. And the high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule, or to impose himself in any other way.

Albert Einstein
I shall conduct the reader over the road that I have myself traveled, rather a rough and winding road, because otherwise I cannot hope that he will take much interest in the result at the end of the journey. The conclusion I shall arrive at is that the field equations of gravitation which I have championed hitherto still need a slight modification.

Albert Einstein
Dear Schrodinger: You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality — if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality — reality as something independent of what is experimentally established.

Albert Einstein