All Quotes

"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change"

"Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity."

"Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart."

"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor."

"Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens and the moral universe within."

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

"The search for truth is more precious than its possession."

"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

"The mind that opens to a new idea, Never comes back to its original size."

"Die Astrologie ist eine Wissenschaft für sich. Aber eine wegweisende. Ich habe viel aus ihr gelernt und vielen Nutzen aus ihr ziehen können. Die physikalischen Erkenntnisse unterstreichen die Macht der Sterne über irdisches Geschick. Die Astrologie aber unterstreicht in gewissem Sinne wiederum die physikalischen Erkenntnisse. Deshalb ist sie eine Art Lebens-elixier für die Gesellschaft!"

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

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination."

"Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!"

"The most important decision we can make is whether this is a friendly or hostile universe. From that one decision all others spring."

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

"If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

"Nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water."

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?"

"Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience."

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

"Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics."

"International law exists only in textbooks on international law."

"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves."

"You can recognize a really good idea by the fact that its implementation seems impossible in the first place."

"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."

"Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others, it is the only means."

"If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies."

"Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world. The root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity."

"Two vördz: ze smart meterz"

"Shopping wìz ze hwoman!"

"Never share: 1) the secret of your success 2) don't share your problems with anyone 3) Don't share your dreams with anyone. 4) Do not share with anyone how much you earn 5) Don't share your family problems with anyone"

"Dogma is the enemy of progress (speech at Sorbonne, 1929)"

"These days it is common knowledge that short waves are more powerful than long ones, as the very short ones, known as x-rays, damage living tissues. It took half-a-century to learn this fact: it was one of the great discoveries of young Albert Einstein of 1905. When he announced it leading researchers found it most incredible..."

"...do not be impressed by the imprint of a famous publishing house or the volumes of an author's publications. Bear in mind that Einstein needed only seventeen pages for his contribution which revolutionized physics, while there are graphomanics in asylums who use up mounds of paper every day."

"Paula Gunn Allen's description of the tribal culture is helpful in understanding this concept of energy dispersal: "The closest analogy in Western thought is the Einsteinian understanding of matter as a special state or condition of energy. Yet even this concept falls short of the Native American understanding, for Einsteinian energy is essentially stupid, while energy in the Indian view is intelligence manifesting yet another way.""

"The astonishing thing about Einstein's equations is that they appear to have come out of nothing."

"[During 1940s], Einstein was pursuing what he called his ‘‘violon d’Ingres’’—his unified field theory... The so-called strange particles were just being discovered, and the quantum theory was proving ever more powerful. Einstein simply was not much interested. His position was that it was useless to try to understand this new physics until the electron was understood. We now believe that understanding the electron is such an intimate part of the new physics that the electron cannot be understood by itself. But Besso took all his old friend’s attempts extremely seriously, and Einstein gave him detailed explanations of his various formal manipulations. It was a dialogue that somehow reminds me of the plays of Samuel Beckett."

"I was particularly won over by his sweet disposition, by his general kindness, by his simplicity, and by his friendliness. Occasionally, gaiety would gain the upper hand and he would strike a more personal note and even disclose some detail of his day-to-day life. Then again, reverting to his characteristic mood of reflection and meditation, he would launch into a profound and original discussion of a variety of scientific and other problems. I shall always remember the enchantment of all those meetings, from which I carried away an indelible impression of Einstein's great human qualities."

"It is almost impertinent to talk of the ascent of man in the presence of two men, Newton and Einstein, who stride like gods. Of the two, Newton is the Old Testament god; it is Einstein who is the New Testament figure. He was full of humanity, pity, a sense of enormous sympathy. His vision of nature herself was that of a human being in the presence of something god-like, and that is what he always said about nature. He was fond of talking about God: 'God does not play at dice', 'God is not malicious'. Finally Niels Bohr one day said to him, 'Stop telling God what to do'. But that is not quite fair. Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his life showed, and his work, is that when the answers are simple too, then you hear God thinking."

"Like many other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him. ... It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."

"Some people have reported that Einstein was quite a good musician, but others weren't so enthusiastic. A professional violinist claimed he "fiddled like a lumberjack"; a famous pianist playing with him demanded, "For heaven's sake Albert, can't you count?"; and a music critic in Berlin, thinking Einstein was famous for his violin playing rather than physics, judged that "Einstein's playing is excellent, but he does not deserve world fame; there are many others just as good.""

"A niece of Einstein's, in India during the 1960s, paid a special visit to the headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar. She explained that she knew nothing of theosophy or the society, but had to see the place because her uncle always had a copy of Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine on his desk. The individual to whom the niece spoke was Eunice Layton, a world-traveled theosophical lecturer who happened to be at the reception desk when she arrived."

"To-day, thanks to Einstein, we have definite reasons for believing that ultra-precise observation of nature has revealed our natural geometry arrived at with solids and light rays to be slightly non-Euclidean and to vary from place to place. So although the non-Euclidean geometers never suspected it (with the exception of Gauss, Riemann and Clifford), our real world happens to be one of the dream-worlds whose possible existence their mathematical genius forsaw."