“We still do not know one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us”
-Albert Einstein
And, nonetheless, we delight in the eternal mystery with joyful curiosity and a determination to unravel the revelation as best we possibly can.
“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
“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.
“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.
In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations.
“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.
“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
“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself”
-Albert Einstein
By rejecting the status quo and revolutionizing physics with his rebellious notions of space and time, Einstein eventually became the scientific establishment – the authority that younger physicists rebelled against through a “quantum” leap of thought and imagination.
“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.”
Read more on On Being Religious and Grateful for the Mystery…
