Quotes from Albert Einstein

For human community life cannot long endure on a basis of crude force, brutality, terror, and hate.

The single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe the universe is friendly.

The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives.

Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves—such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.

How did it come to pass that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity? The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.

Kebanyakan orang mengatakan bahwa kecerdasanlah yang melahirkan seorang ilmuwan besar. Mereka salah, karakterlah yang melahirkannya.

In reference to how he came to love music after hearing Mozart's sonatas] I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty, at least for me.

Second, the teacher should be given extensive liberty in the selection of the material to be taught and the methods of teaching employed by him. For it is true also of him that pleasure in the shaping of his work is killed by force and exterior pressure.

Every theory is killed sooner or later in that way. But if the theory has good in it, that good is embodied and continued in the next theory.