Albert Einstein Quotes

789 Sourced Quotes

The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.

Albert Einstein
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein
No man can visualize four dimensions, except mathematically … I think in four dimensions, but only abstractly. The human mind can picture these dimensions no more than it can envisage electricity. Nevertheless, they are no less real than electro-magnetism, the force which controls our universe, within, and by which we have our being.

Albert Einstein
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

Albert Einstein
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein
Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

Albert Einstein
In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence. For he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions.

Albert Einstein
What can the schools do to defend democracy? Should they preach a specific political doctrine? I believe they should not. If they are able to teach young people to have a critical mind and a socially oriented attitude, they will have done all that is necessary.

Albert Einstein
Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.

Albert Einstein
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things?

Albert Einstein
I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Albert Einstein
People are like bicycles. They can keep their balance only as long as they keep moving.

Albert Einstein
The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

Albert Einstein
The individual must not merely wait and criticize, he must defend the cause the best he can. The fate of the world will be such as the world deserves.

Albert Einstein
All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.

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
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Albert Einstein
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!

Albert Einstein
But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.

Albert Einstein
Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.

Albert Einstein
The contrasts and contradictions that can permanently live peacefully side by side in a skull make all the systems of political optimists and pessimists illusory.

Albert Einstein
A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt about the significance of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation

Albert Einstein
The doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

Albert Einstein
Berlin is the place to which I am most closely bound by human and scientific ties.

Albert Einstein
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Albert Einstein
What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.
Remark to Ernst Straus

Albert Einstein
Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labour of all.

Albert Einstein
A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitter disappointment.

Albert Einstein
Taken on the whole, I would believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit... not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in what we believe is evil.

Albert Einstein