On Stopping to Smell the Roses

“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”Stop to Smell the Roses - A Universe in a Rose
-Albert Einstein

The true secret of Albert Einstein’s genius was not his raw intellectual power but his ability to harness that intellect to a sense of pure wonder and intense curiosity in everything around him.   

In a world of endless distraction and mindless entertainments are our senses simply numbed to the simple beauty that is all around us every day?

Look close, there’s an entire universe in a single rose, if we just take the time to look.

 

 

 

On Persistence, Perseverance, and Possibility

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.

Now, I’m no Einstein, and you’re no Einstein, but what could you or I create if we had the same perseverance and “passionate curiosity” as he?

On Understanding the Divine

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”
-Albert Einstein, as quoted in Glimpses of the Great (1930) by G. S. Viereck.  

It is simply Man’s folly to think he can divine the true nature of divinity; and then impose the “Wrath of God” on those that would not share, to the last detail, his own limited grasp and faulty notions of God.

On Physics, Reality, and Moral Relativism

“Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality”
-Albert Einstein

One man stands on a train platform inside a train station, another stands on a speeding train as it moves through the station. Both mean seek what is true – Reality.

To each man, the path to that Truth and Reality appears different, relative to the other man’s.

But the Reality both men seek, the one on the platform and the other in the speeding train, is exactly the same. That much is True.