“The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual.”
―
Albert Einstein
“What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him.”
―
Albert Einstein
“The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.”
―
Albert Einstein
“The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.”
―
Albert Einstein
“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.”
―
Albert Einstein
“The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"—cannot hear the music of the spheres.”
―
Albert Einstein
“We are all life trying to live, among other life trying to live.”
―
Albert Einstein
“However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Intelligent life on other planets? I'm not even sure there is on earth!”
―
Albert Einstein