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

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

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 would die of lonely.

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 on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can...

But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?

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

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

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.

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

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal...

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

Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity… what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

My life is a simple thing that would interest no one. It is a known fact that I was born and that is all that is necessary.

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

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 physics than on his violin.Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until...

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 in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a...

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.

Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he’s against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.

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.

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.

People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went 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 child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a...

Regretfully, but I have to admit that A. Einstein was right. -”Who?”. Oh, there was such a guy…

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

Lasting harmony with a woman (was) an undertaking in which I twice failed rather disgracefully.

I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research.

Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion...

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

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

It is the definition of the word ‘object’ which destroys all religions.

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

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

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

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

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

On the big Bang theory: For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present universe.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

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

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock.So I stopped wearing socks.

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.

Knowledge isn’t truth. It’s just mindless agreement. You agree with me, I agree with someone else – we all have knowledge. We haven’t come any closer to the truth. You can never understand anything by agreeing, by making definitions. Only by turning over the possibilities. That’s called thinking. If I say “I know”, I stop...

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

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 – his other paper was the one that formulated the special theory of relativity. That’s what it was like to...