Albert Einstein

1879–1955 · German-born theoretical physicist

Topics: creativity, science, learning, mathematics

• It would not be difficult to come to an agreement as to what we understand by science. Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible.

  — Albert Einstein

• Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

  — Albert Einstein

• I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

  — Albert Einstein

• In science, moreover, the work of the individual is so bound up with that of his scientific predecessors and contemporaries that it appears almost as an impersonal product of his generation.

  — Albert Einstein

• Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.

  — Albert Einstein

• It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

  — Albert Einstein

• I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am.

  — Albert Einstein

• The theoretician is forced, ever more, to allow himself to be directed by purely mathematical, formal points of view in the search for theories, because the physical experience of the experimenter is not capable of leading us up to the regions of the highest abstraction.

  — Albert Einstein

• The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.

  — Albert Einstein

• Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.

  — Albert Einstein

• Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

  — Albert Einstein

• Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.

  — Albert Einstein

• All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.

  — Albert Einstein

• It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature.

  — Albert Einstein

• Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens.

  — Albert Einstein

• A truly rational theory would allow us to deduce the elementary particles (electron, etc.) and not be forced to state them a priori.

  — Albert Einstein

• One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.

  — Albert Einstein

• I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.

  — Albert Einstein

• The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of every day [sic] thinking.

  — Albert Einstein

• Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.

  — Albert Einstein