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“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”
-Albert Einstein
When in doubt, tell the truth; but don’t expect it to always be easy.
On Expressing the Truth
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On Tolerating Freedom – A Crisis in American Culture
“Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
-Albert Einstein
Law, after all, is an expression of the human mind, not, necessarily, of the human heart.
As much as Congress seems intent on weighing in on matters beyond its control – from MoveOn.org to Rush Limgaugh – it serves no purpose than to engender intolerance. A muddling of what freedom of expression really means – a sign of the times.
One or the other may be repugnant (and in fact, one is – the one that smokes a cigar – but that’s just my opinion).
Freedom of public expression does have its limits. But those limits should never be any one ideology’s – or idealogue’s – comfort zone.
Freedom hurts. Get over it. Not everybody is going to be just like you. Or me.
Thank God.
On the Rarity of a Truly Open Mind
“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
-Albert Einstein
Even the most enlightened among us are, for the most part, products of their environment and the society in which they live. Maintaining an open mind and forming unbiased opinions is not only very difficult, it is the rarest of commodities in an increasingly divisive world – whether it left vs. right, rich vs. poor, or one “true religion” vs. any other.
On Gratitude vs. Entitlement
“For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly trustworthy physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whither they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.”
-Albert Einstein, letter, 26 April, 1945
Every day that affords the opportunity to sit in quiet reflection at the end of the day, with a sense of relative safety and, if we are especially fortunate, love, is another day of truly beating the odds; on a scale nearly as enormous as the universe in which the mote of dust, which we call the earth, spins and swings around its lonely star.
Life is easier when approached from gratitude and not entitlement.
On Thinking About Change
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
-Albert Einstein
It has been called the true indication of madness: doing a thing over and over and expecting a different result. And so it is in expecting solutions to the problems that plague us to derive from a mentality that fostered the problems in the first place.
It’s an insane world. Nothing will change that until we change the way we think.
On Developing and Maintaining a Good Attitude
“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
How many times have you wanted to slap someone upside the head who responds with; “Like – whatever”
Such laziness and disrespect implied in such a phrase soon becomes more than an expression of attitude, but of character as well.
On Censoring Science
“The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound development of science, as it is in all spheres of cultural life.”
-Albert Einstein
Science is the unfettered pursuit of pure knowledge. An ideal that can never be fully realized as even the most open human mind – the mind of an Einstein – carries with it the inevitable traces of personal bias. But we can maintain that ideal nonetheless.
Filtering science through moralistic dogma, political agenda, or simple delusion dooms what we would call “science”, and therefore the pursuit of knowledge, to ultimate failure. Knowledge is not advanced and human progress is diminished.
If we are not willing to follow in the path that knowledge takes us, we have no choice but to turn back toward the cave from which we came.
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.”
-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.