Albert Einstein Quotes

789 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Albert Einstein
It is important for the common good to foster individuality: for only the individual can produce the new ideas which the community needs for its continuous improvement and
requirements - indeed, to avoid sterility and petrification

Albert Einstein
Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, where the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Albert Einstein
Physics constitutes a logical system of thought which is in a state of evolution, whose basis cannot be distilled, as it were, from experience by an inductive method, but can only be arrived at by free invention.

Albert Einstein
My interest in science was always essentially limited to the study of principles.... That I have published so little is due to this same circumstance, as the great need to grasp principles has caused me to spend most of my time on fruitless pursuits.

Albert Einstein
To these elementary laws there leads no logical path, but only intuition, supported by being sympathetically in touch with experience.

Albert Einstein
To see with one's own eyes, to feel and judge without succumbing to the suggestive power of the fashion of the day, to be able to express what one has seen and felt in a snappy sentence or even in a cunningly wrought word - is that not glorious? Is it not a proper subject for congregation?

Albert Einstein
It is not easy to talk about how I reached the idea of the theory of relativity; there were so many hidden complexities to motivate my thought, and the impact of each thought was different at different stages in the development of the idea.

Albert Einstein
This theory [quantum theory] reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts.

Albert Einstein
The answer is 'yes' or 'no', depending on the interpretation.
On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation

Albert Einstein
Unless the cause of peace based on law gathers behind it the force and zeal of a religion, it hardly can hope to succeed.

Albert Einstein
Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small

Albert Einstein