Albert Einstein Spirit Quotations

The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ... [By seeking] logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.

Men should continue to fight, but they should fight for things worth while, not for imaginary geographical lines, racial prejudices and private greed draped in the color's of patriotism.

I'd rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.

What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.

If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.

Student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.

What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the World.

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.

The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, and religious scripture a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.

If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favour by means of magic and prayer.

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us.

How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will.

We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of 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.

Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work...

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.

The main task of the spirit is to free man from his ego.

Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility.

If I could do it all again, I'd be a plumber.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…

Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.

Everyone must become their own person, however frightful that may be.

We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.

The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.

The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.

I thought of that while riding my bicycle.

Never memorize something that you can look up.

The human spirit must prevail over technology.

Everything in life is vibration.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift.

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

Life isn't worth living, unless it is lived for someone else.

Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty

Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of the striving for the wish fulfillment of material kinds. The goal is to raise the spiritual values of society.

A ship is always safe at the shore - but that is NOT what it is built for.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

Imagination is the highest form of research.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling 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.

I see my life in terms of music.

Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.

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.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

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.

The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

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.

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

We are all life trying to live, among other life trying to live.

Overemphasis of the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.

All means prove but blunt instruments, if they have not behind them a living spirit.

A human being is part of a whole called by us the universe.

Great spirits often meet violent oppisition with mediocre minds.

Brilliant spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

I love Humanity but I hate humans

I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

God did not create evil. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of God.