“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”
―
Albert Einstein
“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
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Albert Einstein
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.”
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Albert Einstein
“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude… ”
―
Albert Einstein
“Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.”
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Albert Einstein
“The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.”
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Albert Einstein
“The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.”
―
Albert Einstein
“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.”
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Albert Einstein
“It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.”
―
Albert Einstein
“Човек започва да живее тогава, когато може да живее извън себе си.”
―
Albert Einstein
