Albert Einstein Quotes
Creativity
- The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
- Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
- I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
- 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 any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
- The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
- To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
- True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
- The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
- It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Life
- A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
- Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
- Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
- Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
- Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
- Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
- I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.
- 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.
- I have just got a new theory of eternity.
- Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
- Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.
Mathematics
- Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
- 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.
- Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Love
- Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
- Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
- Love is a better teacher than duty.
- Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
- When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
- Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.
Science
- Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours.
- Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
- If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
- If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
- Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
- It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.
- It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.
- Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
- Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
- When the solution is simple, God is answering.
- The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
- The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.
- Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
- The process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.
- To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
- Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
- The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
- Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
- The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
- All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
Thinking and Knowledge
- He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
- Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
- I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!
- I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
- I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
- I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
- A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. Information is not knowledge.
- It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
- Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will.
- Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.
- Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
- Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.
- Never lose a holy curiosity.
- No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
- On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.
- Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
- 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 any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
- You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
- The only source of knowledge is experience.
- The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
- We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
- The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
- The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
- We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
- The only real valuable thing is intuition.
- There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.
- Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.