"If A equals success, then the formula is: A=X+Y+Z, X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut."
-Albert Einstein
Work hard, have fun, and remember it's usually best to listen instead of talk.
“While religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra.”
-Albert Einstein
The spectacle is on full display in political rallies where the speaker is thought to be “full of the holy spirit” and yet people come away full of hate and suspicion. It is practiced in pulpits that preach that only one particular political ideology is sanctioned by God and all others are abhorrent. It turns the highest aspirations of the truly faithful and thoughtful into a farce, rejecting any real notion of God and instead pandering to fear and division.
“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.
“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.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
Albert Einstein’s curiosity was his “religion”. He believed that the path toward God was found through a passionate and unending curiosity about the universe and our place in it. No miracle was necessary to see God, for in the very structure of the cosmos was the soul of God.
“Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me."
-Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein’s genius was as much a product of his heart and imagination as it was pure intellect.
Through his imagination he looked at the world and saw the fundemental underpinnings of space and time. And through his heart he could imagine a world of peace and dignity for every living soul.
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us_universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-Albert Einstein
“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
It took years for Einstein to formulate his theories of special and general relativity. As he himself said, it was through “no special talent” that he unlocked these insights into how the universe works, but due to his “passionate curiosity”. Einstein thus found the will and inspiration to persevere, transforming physics and how we look at our world.
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
-Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein's brain wasn’t your average run-of-the-mill brain. It’s still around somewhere; some say it’s in a small-town doctor’s office in Kansas, in a mason jar tucked in a cardboard box behind behind a beer cooler…
