Quotes About Einstein

The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a functional labour analogous to the mechanical making of sausages, the grinding of corn or the crushing of ore: he used to produce thought, continuously, as a mill makes flour, and death was above all, for him, the cessation of a localized function: 'the most powerful brain of all has stopped thinking'.

As Einstein might have put it, only a very malicious (and, therefore, in his mind unimaginable) God would have conspired to have created a universe that so unambiguously points to a Big Bang origin without its having occurred.

m equals e divided by c2

By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn't believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough.

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.

Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.

they left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. "You will never see it again," he told her.

but then I was so utterly entranced by our discussion of Einstein's relative theory - Relativity, Ling corrected quickly under her breath. - that I completely lost track of the time. Funny, Ling whispered. What? Henry said. Lost track of... Ling shook her head, never mind.

Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.

What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.

If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)

Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.

Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who says there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University, page 214)

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty

I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime.

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -how passionately I hate them!

I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.