Albert Einstein

Of all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to except for the society of the true seekers, which has very few living members at any one time.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Understanding of our fellow human beings...becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feelings in joy and sorrow.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.

I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.

In my relativity theory I set up a clock at every point in space, but in reality I find it difficult to provide even one clock in my room.

The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

When we are working at something, we come down from our high logical horse and sniff around with our nose to the ground. Then we obliterate our traces in order to become more God-like.

Outer changes always begin with an inner change of attitude.

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Fear or stupidity has always been the basis of most human actions.

But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

I would not think that philosophy and reason themselves will be man's guide in the foreseeable future; however, they will remain the most beautiful sanctuary they have always been for the select few.

The true definition of madness is repeating the same action, over and over, hoping for a different result.

I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me.

The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple