Albert Einstein Quotations

On Knowledge:

• "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage-- to move in the opposite direction."
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
• "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
• "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
• "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
• "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
• "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
• "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for     existing."

His Understanding of the World:

• "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
• "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
• "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
• "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
• "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
• "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
• "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
• "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
• "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
• "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
• "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
• "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
• "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

On People and Life:

• "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
• "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
• "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
• "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
• "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
• "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
• "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
• "No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
• "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."
• "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."
• "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
• "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."
• "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
• "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."
• "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest...a kind of optical delusion of his 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."

On Math and Science and Education: