Albert Einstein's Wit & Wisdom

See Also: Albert Einstein Biography

Compiled by Teri Ann Berg Olsen, author of
"Learning for Life: Educational Words of Wisdom"

Einstein was a great thinker – not just in math and science, but in every sense of the word – as shown by this collection of quotations from his writings and speeches.

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are details.”

“The more I learn, the more I realize [how much] I don’t know.”

“There is too much education, especially in American schools.”

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom….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.”

“Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”

“One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”

“Why should I fill my head with things like that when I could look them up in any reference book in two minutes?”

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

“If you want your children to be brilliant, tell them fairy tales. If you want them to be very brilliant, tell them even more fairy tales.”

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

“I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”

“Example isn’t another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.”

“I owe more to my ability to fantasize than to any knowledge I’ve ever acquired.”

“At the age of 12, I experienced a wonder in a booklet dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my hands at the beginning of a school year. Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which -- though by no means evident -- could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me.”

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you, and you don’t know how or why.”

“Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion….The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

“By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.”

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”

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

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”

“Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors…is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”

“Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!”

“He who joyfully marches 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 suffice.”

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

“I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.”

“I think and think for months and years. Ninety nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

“Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.”

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

“If A = success in life, then A = X + Y + Z. Work is X; Y is play; and Z is keeping your mouth shut.”

“Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our 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.”

“Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.”

“I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.”

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.”

“The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.”

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all 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.”

“How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”

“As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene… No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”

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

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

“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. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

“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.”

“The order in the world and the universe is as likely to have been caused by a random big bang, as an explosion in a print shop is likely to produce a complete unabridged dictionary.”

“I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”

“I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

“What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.”

“Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source . . . They are creatures who can't hear the music of the spheres.”

“The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

“Everyone who is seriously interested in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to man, and one in the face of which our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”

“It is very difficult to elucidate this [cosmic religious] feeling to anyone who is entirely without it ... In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”

“We know nothing about [God, the world] at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. Possibly we shall know a little more than we do now, but the real nature of things, that we shall never know, never.”

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, 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 fact, religious.”

“I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care for money. Decorations, titles, or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin, and my sailboat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers.”

“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”

See Also: Albert Einstein Biography

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