Albert Einstein

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.

A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.

The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion 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 compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, sparking evolution.

The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving. Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all true art and all true science. Anyone to whom this sentiment is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.

The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.

The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's already dead.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.