“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
-Albert Einstein
And if you don’t understand it by now, be prepared to pull an all-nighter figuring it out.
On Taxes
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Category Archives: History Blog Project
On the Relative Nature of Absolute Time
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”
-Albert Einstein
When an hour is but a minute, and a minute like an eternity.
On Seeing the Forest for the Trees
“What does a fish know about the water in which it swims all its life?”
-Albert Einstein
Is it possible for a fish to swim its entire life and never know of the ocean?
If so, does it make you wonder what you’re missing, swimming through your own life?
On How We’re All In This Together
“The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave”
-Albert Einstein
You’re reading this and I’m writing it. Neither one of us matter without the other.
On Thinking Outside the Box
“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.”
-Albert Einstein
To get inside the box, you begin outside it. Innovation is what happens outside the box.
On the Source of Human Values
“Liberty is the necessary foundation for the development of all true values”
-Albert Einstein
Without the freedom of mind and spirit, human values grind under the weight of oppression and want.
On Nature and Discovery
“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.
Einstein’s vision of the world and the universe encompasses the boundary of human imagination. The point where the science of the empirical world intersects with the faith in the spiritual dimension that lies beyond our limited perception. However limited, Einstein stretched that boundary, for which we are eternally grateful. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Albert Einstein takes a break
The Albert Einstein blog will continue the first week of March. In the meantime, in the spirit of Einstein, let’s all stretch.
Stay curious.
On Going to School vs. Getting an Education
“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.
On Mystery and Salvation
“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.
On the Next Step in Human Evolution
“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.