Quotes by Albert Einstein


Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
– Albert Einstein

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
– Albert Einstein

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
– Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
– Albert Einstein

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
– Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
– Albert Einstein
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
– Albert Einstein
A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
– Albert Einstein
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; 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
A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.
– Albert Einstein
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?
– Albert Einstein
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
– Albert Einstein
After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.
– Albert Einstein
All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
– Albert Einstein
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike-and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
– Albert Einstein
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
– Albert Einstein
All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.
– Albert Einstein
All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.
– Albert Einstein
All these constructions and the laws connecting them can be arrived at by the principle of looking for the mathematically simplest concepts and the link between them.
– Albert Einstein
All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.
– Albert Einstein
An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.
– Albert Einstein
An oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society because under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information.
– Albert Einstein
Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.
– Albert Einstein
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
– Albert Einstein
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
– Albert Einstein
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.
– Albert Einstein
As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
– Albert Einstein
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.
– Albert Einstein
Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.
– Albert Einstein
But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.
– Albert Einstein
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
– Albert Einstein
Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
– Albert Einstein
Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.
– Albert Einstein
Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
– Albert Einstein
Do you believe in immortality? No, and one life is enough for me.
– Albert Einstein
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
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
– Albert Einstein
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
– Albert Einstein
Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.
– Albert Einstein
Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance.
– Albert Einstein
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
– Albert Einstein
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
– Albert Einstein
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
– Albert Einstein
Force always attracts men of low morality.
– Albert Einstein
Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.
– Albert Einstein
Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.
– Albert Einstein
God always takes the simplest way.
– Albert Einstein
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
– Albert Einstein
God does not play dice.
– Albert Einstein
God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.
– Albert Einstein
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
– Albert Einstein
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
– Albert Einstein
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
– Albert Einstein
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!
– Albert Einstein
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot.
– Albert Einstein
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.
– Albert Einstein
How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
– Albert Einstein
Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
– Albert Einstein
Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity own to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the of the inquiring constructive mind.
– Albert Einstein
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.
– Albert Einstein
I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
– Albert Einstein
I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
– Albert Einstein
I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.
– Albert Einstein
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.
– Albert Einstein
I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.
– Albert Einstein
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
– Albert Einstein
I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.
– Albert Einstein
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
– Albert Einstein
I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!
– Albert Einstein
I have just got a new theory of eternity.
– Albert Einstein
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.
– Albert Einstein
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
– Albert Einstein
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
– Albert Einstein
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
– Albert Einstein
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas.
– Albert Einstein
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
– Albert Einstein
I made one great mistake in my life-when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made but there was some justification-the danger that the Germans would make them.
– Albert Einstein
I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research.
– Albert Einstein
I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
– Albert Einstein
I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
– Albert Einstein
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.
– Albert Einstein
I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.
– Albert Einstein
I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details.
– Albert Einstein
If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
– Albert Einstein
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
– Albert Einstein
If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies... It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.
– Albert Einstein
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
– Albert Einstein
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
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
– Albert Einstein
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
– Albert Einstein
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
– Albert Einstein
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
– 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
In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
– Albert Einstein
Information is not knowledge.
– Albert Einstein
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
– Albert Einstein
Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.
– Albert Einstein
Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?
– Albert Einstein
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
– Albert Einstein
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
– Albert Einstein