Albert Einstein Quotes

On Love:

Love is a better teacher than duty.

On Life:

I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

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.

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive forwork in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury — to me these have always been contemptible. I assume that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born and that is all that is necessary.

The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned.

Do you believe in immortality No, and one life is enough for me

On Death:

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident for someone who’s dead.

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.

On Happiness:

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

On Success:

It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service.

On Attitude:

The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.

On Fear:

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenatrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties – this knowledge, this feeling … that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself amoung profoundly religious men.

On Learning:

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

On Knowledge:

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Knowledge is limited but imagination encircles the world

On God:

When the solution is simple, God is answering.

God does not play dice.

God may be subtle, but he isn’t plain mean.

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

God is subtle but not malicious.

God is subtle, but he is not malicious.

Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er icht. The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not.

Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all

If God has created the world, his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us.

MacMillan has this particular quote simply as God doesn’t play dice. and notes that it is often quoted as doesn’t play dice with the universe

God does not play dice with the universe.

God is clever, but not dishonest.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.

On Religion:

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.

Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man.