Albert Einstein Inspirational Quotations [Page 2]

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies Opportunity.

Where you see difficulty, I see opportunity.

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

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

The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

The thinking that got us to where we are is not the thinking that will get us to where we want to be.

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.

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

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.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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.

You never fail until you stop trying.

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

I love Humanity but I hate humans

Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

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.

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

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.

Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.

Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based 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.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

I see my life in terms of music.

Adversity introduces a man to himself.

Imagination is the highest form of research.

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut

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.

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

If you have never failed, you have never tried anything new.

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

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

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.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.

I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

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.

In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity.

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

Out of clutter, find simplicity.

From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

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

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.

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.

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.

The human spirit must prevail over technology.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

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.

I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.

Never memorize something that you can look up.

I thought of that while riding my bicycle.

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

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

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

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.

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

It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.

When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.

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.

God always takes the simplest way.

If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.

Information is not knowledge.

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…

A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitter disappointment.

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

God does not play dice.

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

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.

Everyone has two choices. We're either full of love... or full of fear.

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

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.

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

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

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

Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

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

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

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

I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

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