530 quotes
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.
Mein Weltbild (1931)
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
a letter to an atheist (1954)
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.
I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude — a feeling which increases with the years.
Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.
Christianity and Judaism
The World As I See It (1949)
When the special theory of Relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts… I used to go away for weeks in state of confusion.
You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.
A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value.
Science and Religion (1941)
Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
What I particularly admire in him is the firm stand he has taken, not only against the oppressors of his countrymen, but also against those opportunists who are always ready to compromise with the Devil. He perceives very clearly that the world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.
Viereck interview (1929)
What led me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field.
Letter to the Michelson Commemorative Meeting of the Cleveland Physics Society (1952)
What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field.
Letter to the Michelson Commemorative Meeting of the Cleveland Physics Society (1952)
One hopes Debye will soon demonstrate the incorrectness of the hypothesis of zero-point energy, the theoretical untenability of which became glaringly obvious to me soon after the publication of the paper I coauthored with Mr. Stern.
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 a lot of mankind.
Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
Mein Weltbild (1931)
Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts
Production and Work
The World As I See It (1949)
I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings.
Viereck interview (1929)
In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.
Obituary for Emmy Noether (1935)
Mankind's desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government. With all my heart, I believe that the world's present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war, and inhumanity.