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)
Love to travel, but hate to arrive.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Hate
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Research
Our defense is not in our armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Law
The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Problems, Create, Discovery, Thinking, Think
The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake—the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: War
It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education is a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Education
The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty and truth.
—Albert Einstein
I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.
—Albert Einstein
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Good
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Trying, Mistakes
There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Kind, New
If I am right the Germans will say I was a German, and the French will say I was a Jew; if I am wrong the Germans will say I was a Jew and the French will say I was a German.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Jews
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
Topics: Education
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
Topics: Goals
I never think about the future—it comes soon enough.
—Albert Einstein
You never fail until you stop trying.
—Albert Einstein
Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Love, Romance, People
The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Thinking
The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.
—Albert Einstein
Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Happiness
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Maturity, Solitude
Nor do I take into account a danger of starting a chain reaction of a scope great enough to destroy part or all of the planet … But it is not necessary to imagine the earth being destroyed like a nova by a stellar explosion to understand vividly the growing scope of atomic war and to recognize that unless another war is prevented it is likely to ring destruction on a scale never before held possible, and even now hardly conceived, and that little civilization would survive it.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Peace
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
Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Conscience
Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Respect, Self Respect, Self-Esteem
Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Diet, Vegetarianism, Evolution, Survival
A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education, and social relationships; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Ethics, Behavior
God is subtle, but He is not malicious. I cannot believe that God plays dice with the world.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: God, Gambling
If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Society, Life, Success & Failure, Strength, Work, Success
Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.
—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
Topics: Communism, Socialism
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Questions, Life, Friends and Friendship, Nature, Tomorrow, Learning, Graduation, Hope
There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be obtainable from the atom.
—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
Topics: Learning
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
In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Relationships
Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Education
True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Goodness
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
Topics: Knowledge
Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It’s not hard. Character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking. Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: People, Character
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