- "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
- "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
- "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
- "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
- "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
- "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
His Understanding of the World:
- "I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
- "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
- "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
- "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
- "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
- "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
- "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
- "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
- "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
- "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
- "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
- "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
- "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)
On People and Life:
- "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
- "A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
- "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
- "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
- "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
- "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
- "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
- "No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
- "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
- "The release of atom 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."
- "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
- "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
- "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
- "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
Source Unknown