"The world is a dangerous place. Not because of those who do terrible things. But because of those who let them do it."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"No, this trick won'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 he solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
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."
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no reli
gious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
"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."
"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."
"...one of the strongest motives
that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."
"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 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."
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"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."
"I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe." or sometimes quoted as "God does not play dice with the universe."
"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."
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium (1941) ch. 13
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
"What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," for the October 26, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
"The m
ost beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and 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."
Quoted on pg. 289 of Adventures of a Mathematician, by S. M. Ulam(Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1976). Apparently these words also occur somewhere in What I Believe (1930).
"Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love"
"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
"Science is the century-old endeavour to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existen ce by the process of conceptualisation. Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary."
"I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research."
"Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness?
The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it."
"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium (1941) ch. 13
"The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder."
"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. "
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
"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"
"When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific
method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Neverthess, noone doub ts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact perdiction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature."
"Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be i nfluenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being."
[Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote
and asked if scientists pray. Source: "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann]
"In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them hither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which t hey look for vivid experience and the satisfaction
of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the peop le belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside"
"I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it."
"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."
"Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality".
"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. Bu t 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."
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."
"When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe, he doesn't realize that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it."
"I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."
"It's not that I'm so smart , it's just that I stay with problems longer ."
"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber."
"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I get most joy in life out of music."
"What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," for the October 26, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
"What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," for the October 26, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.
"I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details.."
"My life is a simp
le thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born and that is all that is necessary."
"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue."
This is a story I heard as a freshman at the University of Utah when Dr. Henry Eyring was still teaching chemistry there. Many years before he and Dr. Einstein were colleagues. As they walked together they noted an unusual plant growing along a garden walk. Dr. Eyring asked Dr. Einstein if he knew what the plant was. Einstein did not, and together they consulted a gardener. The gardener indicated the plant was green beans and forever afterwards Eyring said Einstein didn't know beans
"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."
"True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness."
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
"I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe." or sometimes quoted as "God does not play dice with the universe."
"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
"I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details.."
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."
[Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955]
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will "
"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we
experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or ab surd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
爱因斯坦的名言[Albert Einstein,_The World as I See It_]
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgements are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. 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 aspir ations and valuations. 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