Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.

Why should I have to hide the fact that I don’t believe there’s a supreme being? There’s no proof of it. There’s no harm in saying you’re an atheist. It doesn’t mean you treat people...

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical...

Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: ‘Who’s the third?

By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous...

People who have fully prepared always save time. Albert Einstein was right to teach that if he is given six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first four sharpening the axes....

Mr. Albert Einstein was right: If you feel you need to go one way, even when everyone else is going the other way, do so, do so to make positive changes in your life and...

I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come...

The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his...

I’m in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems...

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he...

I realized that more and more I was saying, ‘It seems to me that we have come to the time war ought to be given up. It no longer makes sense to kill 20 million...

My dad said to me a few years ago: “There’s no harm in thinking.” We were talking about Crazy Uncle Albert and whether it was right to use your brain to build weapons.He said, “You...

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him...

The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.

Lies Have expiry dates but the truth never expires

the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was...

After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalised by extending it to all material particles and...

Sequel to Albert Einstein’s quote “education is what remains after you have forgotten what you learned in school,” beauty is what remains inside a body after it has wrinkled.

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the...

I made a mistake and it was forgiven, but the damage done has been remarkable. Nothing comes easy after a typhoon cleared all property. I left you hanging that’s why I came back and willing...

Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as...

Religions and states and classes and tribes and nations do not have to work or argue for their adherents and subjects. They more or less inherit them. Against this unearned patrimony there have always been...

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don’t know how smart or thick you are....

On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing...

[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar...

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with...

What Albert Einstein termed optical delusion,The Indians termed Maya or Illusion.

If it’s true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein...

If you can bring yourself to apply your imagination to finding the possible favorable outcomes of undesired developments, even if only as an exercise, you’ll see that it fosters creativity. This suggestion is much more...

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

IF”—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein’s equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

On the other side, Church spokesmen could scarcely become enthusiastic about Planck’s deism, which omitted all reference to established religions and had no more doctrinal content than Einstein’s Judaism.

I believe in you and me. I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life — in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds,...

The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.

Never regard study as a duty but as an 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...