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.

Deux choses sont infinies : l’Univers et la bêtise humaine. Mais, en ce qui concerne l’Univers, je n’en ai pas encore acquis la certitude absolue.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.

If I could have anyone’s mind for a day, I really can’t think of anyone other than Einstein.

There is no doubt that Einstein’s pipe was his closest associate, while others–including wife and family–were never permitted the illusion that they would ever be at the center of his life.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe

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...

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved...

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth.

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.

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...

Matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.

When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe, he doesn’t realize that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.

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?

…why do people venerate Einstein or Bill Gates? Clive Bell explains: Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age….

Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.

Two things inspire me to awe — the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.

I would die of lonely.

After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity – now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in...

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

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them hither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior...

All our lauded technological progress — our very civilization – is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.

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.

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

No, this trick wont work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

If you can’t illustrate ‘it’, ‘it’ doens’t belong in Physics as a noun! You can’t put an article in front. You can’t put a verb after!

By the power of the Tri-Force, I command you to “——-

Example isn’t another way to teach, it is the only way to teach

Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because they have the bomb but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic attack, they are not likely to conduct their policy...

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based...

Looking at numbers as groups of rocks may seem unusual, but actually it’s as old as math itself. The word “calculate” reflects that legacy — it comes from the Latin word calculus, meaning a pebble...

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...

Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of...

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

A certain wise man once said that God didn’t play dice with the universe, but that man was wrong. Sometimes I think He must even try Russian roulette.

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service

A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.

Einstein’s paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905, and Einstein has another paper in the very same journal where it appeared...

Human beings, vegetables, or comic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player

With the affairs of active human beings it is different. Here knowledge of truth alone does not suffice; on the contrary this knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to...

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend’s...

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.

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.

I want to know God’s thoughts…the rest are details

[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...

La vie c’est comme la bicyclette : quand on arrête de pédaler on tombe.

If I had my life to live over again, I’d be a plumber.