Einstein: His Life and Universe

To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he [Einstein] said.

One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

How did he get his ideas? “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said, “at least for me.

Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

(In a letter from Einstein to Curie) Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the publc is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages amoung us as you, and Langevin too, real peole with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply dont read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.

I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality,

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. —ALBERT EINSTEIN, IN A LETTER TO HIS SON EDUARD, FEBRUARY 5, 19301

He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.

If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake,” he said. “Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister.” Freedom was a foundation for creativity.

During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.

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

Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it.

When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said. “But,” he hastened to add, “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller’s voice then dropped to a whisper. “Please don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I am Dr. Einstein, I’m on my way home, and I’ve forgotten where my house is.”40

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”46

Falling in love is not the most stupid thing that people do,” Einstein scribbled on the letter, “but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.

What do you think of Adolf Hitler?” Einstein replied, “He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.

It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he told Dukas. “I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”*

Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he answered, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.

Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny,” he warned the Russian scientists. “The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen.”27