Albert Einstein

One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.

— Albert Einstein

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

— Albert Einstein

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.

— Albert Einstein

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

— Albert Einstein

But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.

— Albert Einstein

All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.

— Albert Einstein

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem -- in my opinion -- to characterize our age.

— Albert Einstein

The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

— Albert Einstein

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

— Albert Einstein

If one asks the whence derives the authority of fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence.

— Albert Einstein

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

— Albert Einstein

Though our conduct seems so very different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much alike in them and in us.

— Albert Einstein

Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes -- goodwill among men and peace on earth.

— Albert Einstein

All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.

— Albert Einstein

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

— Albert Einstein

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

— Albert Einstein

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

— Albert Einstein

On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.

— Albert Einstein

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

— Albert Einstein

It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.

— Albert Einstein

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

— Albert Einstein

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.

— Albert Einstein

Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

— Albert Einstein

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

— Albert Einstein

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

— Albert Einstein

To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.

— Albert Einstein

The ideas that have lighted my way and, time after time, have given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

— Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

— Albert Einstein

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

— Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery everyday. Never lose a holy curiosity.

— Albert Einstein

Never lose a holy curiosity.

— Albert Einstein

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

— Albert Einstein

And the high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule, or to impose himself in any other way.

— Albert Einstein

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

— Albert Einstein

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

— Albert Einstein

Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance.

— Albert Einstein

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need. strangled the holy curious of inquiry. 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

According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.

— Albert Einstein

The bitter and the sweet come from the outside, the hard from within, from one's own efforts.

— Albert Einstein

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas.

— Albert Einstein

The only source of knowledge is experience.

— Albert Einstein

Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning the meaning of the bodily object.

— Albert Einstein

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

— Albert Einstein

To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty... this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

— Albert Einstein

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

— Albert Einstein

I can't believe that God plays dice with the universe.

— Albert Einstein

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.

— Albert Einstein

If one were to take that goal out of out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.

— Albert Einstein

God does not play dice with the universe.

— Albert Einstein

God is clever, but not dishonest.

— Albert Einstein

God is subtle, but He is not malicious. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world.

— Albert Einstein

In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.

— Albert Einstein

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

— Albert Einstein

Many times a day I realize how much my own life is built on the labors of my fellowmen, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

— Albert Einstein

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

— Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

— Albert Einstein

A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

— Albert Einstein

Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.

— Albert Einstein

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

— Albert Einstein

They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

— Albert Einstein

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

— Albert Einstein

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.

— Albert Einstein

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

— Albert Einstein

Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.

— Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

— Albert Einstein

In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts.

— Albert Einstein

Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

— Albert Einstein

At the same time, as social beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.

— Albert Einstein

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.

— Albert Einstein

We should take care not to make the intellect our god: it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

— Albert Einstein

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

— Albert Einstein

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

— Albert Einstein

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

— Albert Einstein

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.

— Albert Einstein

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

— Albert Einstein

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

— Albert Einstein

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

— Albert Einstein

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

— Albert Einstein

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

— Albert Einstein

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

— Albert Einstein

Love is a better teacher than duty.

— Albert Einstein

You can't blame gravity for falling in love.

— Albert Einstein

Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love

— Albert Einstein

To the Master's honor all must turn, each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton's ground.

— Albert Einstein

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

— Albert Einstein

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

— Albert Einstein

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.

— Albert Einstein

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

— Albert Einstein

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

— Albert Einstein

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

— Albert Einstein

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.

— Albert Einstein

Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.

— Albert Einstein

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

— Albert Einstein

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.

— Albert Einstein

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

— Albert Einstein

The environment is everything that isn't me.

— Albert Einstein

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

— Albert Einstein

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

— Albert Einstein