530 quotes
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.
Disputed
Study and in general the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
Yes, we now have to divide up our time like that, between politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
Attributed
Body and soul are not two different things, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic thought.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
Philosophy is like a mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.
Misattributed
Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world. The root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity.
Misattributed
We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them
Disputed
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
In December, 1947, he made the following statement: "I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my life."
Disputed
Fairy tales and more fairy tales. [in response to a mother who wanted her son to become a scientist and asked Einstein what reading material to give him]
Disputed Found in Montana Libraries: Volumes 8-14 (1954)
Fairy tales and more fairy tales.
Disputed
Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
You must warn people not to make the intellect their God. The intellect knows methods but it seldom knows values, and they come from feeling. If one doesn't play a part in the creative whole, he is not worth being called human. He has betrayed his true purpose.
Attributed Einstein and the Poet (1983)
Try not to become a man of success, but a man of value. Look around at how people want to get more out of life than they put in. A man of value will give more than he receives. Be creative, but make sure that what you create is not a curse for mankind.
Attributed Einstein and the Poet (1983)
It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards. But that He plays dice and uses "telepathic" methods... is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.
Attributed Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.
Attributed
We cannot solve the problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them
Disputed