“The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.”
―
Albert Einstein
“I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”
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Albert Einstein
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
―
Albert Einstein
“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?”
―
Albert Einstein
“One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
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Albert Einstein
“If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
―
Albert Einstein
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
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Albert Einstein
“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.”
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Albert Einstein
“What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.”
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Albert Einstein
“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.”
―
Albert Einstein
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me.
- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp”
―
Albert Einstein
