quotations- Einstein

Human beings can attain a worthy and harmonious life only if they are able to rid themselves, within the limits of human nature, of striving to fulfill wishes of the material kind.

 

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.

 

A human being. . .experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

 

Failure and deprivation are the best educators and purifiers.

 

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike.

 

Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means.  It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final.  We must always be ready to change these notions—that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics—in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically.

 

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience

correspond to a logically uniform system of thought. . .

The sense experiences are the given subject matter.

 

“Being is always something which is mentally constructed by us,

that is, something which we freely posit (in the logical sense).

The justification of such. . .constructs, which represent “reality” for us,

lies alone in their quality of making intelligible what is sensorily given.

 

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

 

We attribute to the bodily object “a real existence. . .”

by means of such concepts and mental relations between them,

We are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions.

These notions and relations. . .appear to us as stronger and more unalterable

than the individual sense experience itself,

The character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed.

 

There is no essential distinction between mass and energy.

Energy has mass and mass has energy.

Instead of two conservation laws we have only one, that of mass-energy.

 

We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. . .

There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter,

field being the only reality.

 

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn, persistent illusion.

 

It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold

that it encounters its greatest successes,

even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk

of falling a prey to illusions.

 

Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. . . The situation may be expressed by an image:

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

 

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