Recommended Reading
- ‘Einstein: His Life and Universe‘ by Walter Isaacson
- ‘The World As I See It‘ by Albert Einstein
- ‘Ideas And Opinions‘ by Albert Einstein
- ‘Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms‘ by Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw
- ‘The Ultimate Quotable Einstein‘ by Albert Einstein, Alice Calaprice, Freeman Dyson
Inspirational Quotes by Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men-above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. My peace of mind is often troubled by the depressing sense that I have borrowed too heavily from the work of other men.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Life, Gratitude, Giving, Work, Oddity, Love, Happiness, Help, Peculiarity, Cooperation
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.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: God
I am not more gifted than the average human being. If you know anything about history, you would know that is so—what hard times I had in studying and the fact that I do not have a memory like some other people do… I am just more curious than the average person and I will not give up on a problem until I have found the proper solution. This is one of my greatest satisfactions in life—solving problems—and the harder they are, the more satisfaction do I get out of them. Maybe you could consider me a bit more patient in continuing with my problem than is the average human being. Now, if you understand what I have just told you, you see that it is not a matter of being more gifted but a matter of being more curious and maybe more patient until you solve a problem.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: History, Life, Great, Yin, Act, Action, Give, Dying, People
When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don’t have in my mouth.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Philosophy
A question that sometimes drives me crazy: am I or are the others crazy?
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Perspective
It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature … In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Reality
I don’t know the weapons that will be used in the Third World War, but in the Forth, men will use wood and stones.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Weapon
I believe that the first step in the setting of a real external world is the formation of the concept of bodily objects and of bodily objects of various kinds.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: World
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
Topics: Questions, Principles
Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Education
You never fail until you stop trying.
—Albert Einstein
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Science, Scientists
The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Technology
Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Perspective
Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.
—Albert Einstein
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: School, Education
The legs are the wheels of creativity.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Creativity
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Hope, Life, Learning, Questions, Nature, Friends and Friendship, Graduation, Tomorrow
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
—Albert Einstein
Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Morality
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
—Albert Einstein
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—yet it is the most precious thing we have.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Science
Never regard study as a duty but as an 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 works belong.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Beauty, Education, Learning
Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Simplicity
When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Universe
A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: War, Conflict, One liners
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
Topics: Socialism, Communism
It is theory that decides what can be observed.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Assumptions, Theory
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Emotions
In light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alterations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light—only those who have experienced it can understand it.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Accomplishment
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Werner Heisenberg German Theoretical Physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer American Physicist
Wernher von Braun German-born American Engineer
Stephen Hawking English Theoretical Physicist
Max Planck German Theoretical Physicist
Richard Feynman American Physicist
Niels Bohr Danish Physicist
Hermann Hesse Swiss Novelist, Poet
Charles Proteus Steinmetz German-born American Mathematician
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe German-born American Architect