“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
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Albert Einstein
“Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
- Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray; quoted in: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffmann”
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Albert Einstein
“La vie c’est comme la bicyclette : quand on arrête de pédaler on tombe.”
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Albert Einstein
“We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.”
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Albert Einstein
“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
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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
“Hal yang paling sukar dipahami di dunia ini adalah pajak penghasilan.”
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Albert Einstein
“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
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Albert Einstein
“More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.”
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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.”
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Albert Einstein
“I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind...
to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)”
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Albert Einstein
“Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.”
―
Albert Einstein
“I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.”
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Albert Einstein
“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”
―
Albert Einstein
