Inspirational Quotations by Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

Inspirational Quotations by Albert Einstein

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Virtues, Imagination

A new kind of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.
—Albert Einstein

A man’s value to the community primarily depends on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Action

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Science

But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Action

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: People, Action, Evil

A successful man is he who receives a great deal from his fellow men, usually incomparably more than corresponds to his service to them. The value of a man, however, should be seen in what he gives, and not in what he is able to receive.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Success

In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulae extracted from our minds.
—Albert Einstein

Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Wisdom, Money

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Shopping

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Time Management, Time, Perspective

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Character, Truth

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury–to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind.
—Albert Einstein

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Simplicity

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Simplicity, Wisdom

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Genius, Intelligence, Intellectuals

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Good

Try not to become a man of success, but rather to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Success, Strength, Character, Wisdom, Success & Failure, Integrity, Entrepreneurs, Perspective, Value, Values

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Virtues, Intelligence

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Thinking

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Courage, Ideas

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Excellence, Mastery

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
—Albert Einstein

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Mistakes

Learn from yesterday: Live for today: Hope ‘w.
—Albert Einstein

Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
—Albert Einstein

The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.
—Albert Einstein

The search for truth is more precious than its possession.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Wisdom, Truth

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Marriage

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Education, Teaching

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Intuition

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
—Albert Einstein

Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Ideas

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Wisdom

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Ethics, Morality, Morals

Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.
—Albert Einstein

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Creativity

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 of the community to which your later works belong.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Beauty, Education, Learning

You never fail until you stop trying.
—Albert Einstein

The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Future, The Past, Tomorrow, The Future

The Three Rules of Work: 1. Out of clutter, find simplicity. 2. From discord, find harmony. 3. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Opportunity, Difficulties, Work, Simplicity, Luck, Harmony, Difficulty, Work Ethics

Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
—Albert Einstein

If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.
—Albert Einstein

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Imagination

Enjoying the joys of others and suffering with them–these are the best guides for man.
—Albert Einstein

I think and think, for months, for years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
—Albert Einstein

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Opinion

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Learning, Hope, Life, Questions, Friends and Friendship, Tomorrow, Nature

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
—Albert Einstein

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.
—Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Greatness, Courage, Genius, Ideas, Creativity, Prejudice, Originality, Mediocrity

Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Feelings

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Thinking, Habit, Age, Reading

The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Thinking, Discovery

You cannot solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that has created the problem.
—Albert Einstein

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Knowledge

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Anger, Forgiveness, One liners

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
—Albert Einstein

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.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Humanity, Cooperation

To understand the world one must not be worrying about one’s self.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: World

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
—Albert Einstein

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Giving, World, Wisdom, Vision, Imagination, Knowledge, Progress, Creativity

Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Education

All meaningful and lasting change starts first in your imagination and then works its way out. Imagination is more important than knowledge. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Change, Action, Life, Imagination

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Research

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty, there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
—Albert Einstein

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Ethics

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Miracles

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Understanding

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Civilization, Humanity, Technology

Never stop questioning.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Creativity

I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
—Albert Einstein

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Art, One liners

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Imagination

Nothing happens until something moves.
—Albert Einstein

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Value

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Solitude, Loneliness

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Attitude, Philosophy, Reality, One liners, Perception

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: People, Life, Goals, Entrepreneurs

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful, and then only for a short while.
—Albert Einstein

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious—the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
—Albert Einstein

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.
—Albert Einstein

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Relationships

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Solitude

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
—Albert Einstein

The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving.
—Albert Einstein
Topics: Giving

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