"Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value"
-Albert Einstein
Success takes, value gives.
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."
-Albert Einstein
Man was made in God's image, not He in ours. That we so utterly fail to live up that image is no reflection on God.
"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."
-Albert Einstein
We have no idea what the consequences of a life's work will be. For some it has been unimaginable, relatively speaking.
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
-Albert Einstein
Across a nation an entire population grapples with their own understanding of what even Einstein found baffling: April 15th.
"Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age."
-Albert Einstein
Another way of saying we are much more clever than wise.
"Science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
-Albert Einstein
Our concept and understanding of God necessarily progresses with our own human evolution and our ability to rise above our our base instincts from which we have emerged from the mists of primordial emergence on this earth.
Fear reflects are base origins as creatures on this earth fighting for survival. We strive for God insofar as we seek a rational understanding of the universe and our place within it.
“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.
It is religion as the oppressor, nothing more than a weapon.
“Only to a tiny minority is it given to fascinate their generation by subtle humour and grace and to hold the mirror up to it by the impersonal agency of art. To-day I salute with sincere emotion the supreme master of this method, who has delighted — and educated — us all.”
-Albert Einstein
The artist’s laser-beam, with its wit and easy grace yet also with unrelenting intensity, that reveals to us who we really are and what it means to be human, is a gift beyond accounting, .
From the few, much is given to the many.
“There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.”
-Albert Einstein
Too few are of independent and courageous enough mind to see the truth of the world, as humans inhabit it, and not instead get drawn into the seeming propensity for foolishness.
“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
No man is an island, all are connected and depend on the society of their fellows.
There are those who nonetheless must remain at a distance. The artist, the traveler, the thinker, the loner. Those who find in solace in solitude.
