“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
-Albert Einstein

A true education is the sum total of what you know, not everything you’ve been taught.

“The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind.”
-Albert Einstein

Mystery is the reflected nature of beauty, and the beauty reflected in nature. It is what calls the human spirit to a higher calling.

It is the salvation of humanity.

“Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him secure proof against the the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?”
-Albert Einstein, posing a question to Sigmund Freud

Freud’s reply to Einstein was not encouraging, and humanity has yet to prove him wrong.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
-Albert Einstein, letter to son Eduard, 1930

A life in motion is one of ongoing intellectual curiosity, loving relationships the deepen through the years, and a growing sense of community. Curiosity, love, and selflessness. 

With that, if we are lucky, we can maintain balance and find some modicum of wisdom and maturity.

“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.”
-Albert Einstein

Apathy kills.

“So many people today… seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation…”
-Albert Einstein

We are fast becoming a nation with no sense of history, from high school graduates that kind can’t find Europe on the map to a presidential press secretary that didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was while talking to reporters.

We are disconnected from the past and disinclined to see why it matters; stuck in the prejudice and hubris of the now that is nothing but an illusion, a lack of perspective of which is the consequence of narcissism, arrogance, and apathy.   

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.”

To at once use our capacities to question, to discern as best we can, the workings of nature, while stopping short in reverent awe at the precipice of understanding, like a child looking up in wonder at the clear night sky, is to find religion of the truest kind.