Quotes from Albert Einstein

We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.

As to science, we may well define it for our purpose as "methodical thinking directed toward finding regulative connections between our sensual experiences".

Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.

Common sense invents and constructs no less than its own field than science does in its domain. It is, however, in the nature of common sense not to be aware of this situation.

It is certainly true that principles cannot be more securely founded than on experience and consciously clear thinking.

The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket.

Our defense is not in our armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order.

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things.

The most practical solution is a good theory.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. On being reproached that his formula of gravitation was longer and more cumbersome than Newton's.

Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality.

Galileo - the father of modern physics - indeed of modern science.

It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher.

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

Humor, motivations, moral, gods, energy, secrecy

All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.

So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.