Albert Einstein Quotes

789 Sourced Quotes

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family

Albert Einstein
I believe serious progress (in the abolition of war) can be achieved only when men become organized on an international scale and refuse, as a body, to enter military or war service.

Albert Einstein
While I am a convinced pacifist there are circumstances in which I believe the use of force is appropriate - namely, in the face of an enemy unconditionally bent on destroying me and my people.

Albert Einstein
A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way... The kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation...is wholly different. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world.... That is the "miracle" which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

Albert Einstein
Your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment if you succeed in attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain.

Albert Einstein
Thinking for its own sake, as in music! When I have no special problem to occupy my mind, I love to reconstruct proofs of mathematical and physical theorems that have long been known to me. There is no goal in this, merely an opportunity to indulge in the pleasant occupation of thinking.

Albert Einstein
What a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of the other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

Albert Einstein
There are two ways of resisting war: the legal way and the revolutionary way. The legal way involves the offer of alternatinve service not as a privilege for a few but as a right for all. The revolutionary view involves an uncompromising resistance, with a view to breaking the power of militarism in time of peace or the resources of the state in time of war.

Albert Einstein
I can, if the worst comes to worst, still realize that God may have created a world in which there are no natural laws. In short, a chaos. But that there should be statistical laws with definite solutions, i.e., laws which compel God to throw the dice in each individual case, I find highly disagreeable.

Albert Einstein
Anyone who has ever tried to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner knows the great difficulties of such an attempt.

Albert Einstein
My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.

Albert Einstein
In conclusion I wish to say that in working at the problem here dealt with I have had the loyal assistance of my friend and colleague M. Besso, and that I am indebted to him for several valuable suggestions.

Albert Einstein
[My] deep religiosity... found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.

Albert Einstein
Science exists for Science's sake, like Art for Art's sake, and does not go in for special pleading or for the demonstration of absurdities.

Albert Einstein
I have become an obstinate heretic in the eyes of my colleagues. Momentary success carries more power of conviction than reflections upon principles.

Albert Einstein
There is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.

Albert Einstein
A permanent peace cannot be prepared by threats but only by the honest attempt to create a mutual trust. However strong national armaments may be, they do not create military security for any nation nor do they guarantee the maintenance of peace.

Albert Einstein
It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which [I] lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the "merely personal," from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.

Albert Einstein
Whatever there is of God and goodness in the universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us. We cannot stand aside and let God do it.

Albert Einstein
We have achieved something if we have succeeded in formulating a meaningful and precise question.

Albert Einstein
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.

Albert Einstein
It is only in the quantum theory that Newton's differential method becomes inadequate, and indeed strict causality fails us. But the last word has not yet been said. May the spirit of Newton's method give us the power to restore unison between physical reality and the profoundest characteristic of Newton's teaching - strict causality.

Albert Einstein
Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which threatens to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrades him to the level of a mechanic.

Albert Einstein
Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind... life would have seemed to me empty.

Albert Einstein
Who would be so venturesome as to decide today the question whether causal law and differential law, these ultimate premises of Newton's treatment of nature, must definitely be abandoned.

Albert Einstein
It is just as important to make knowledge live and keep it alive as to solve specific problems.

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

Albert Einstein