Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him.
A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.
From a certain temperature on, the molecules ‘condense’ without attractive forces; that is, they accumulate at zero velocity. The theory is pretty, but is there some truth in it.
As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly significant.
It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw comfort from Lessing’s fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgement in all human affairs.
I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.
The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.
How do I work? I grope.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
My pacifism is not based on any intellectual theory but on a deep antipathy to every form of cruelty and hatred.
The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province.
The wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims.
Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster.
The splitting of the atom has changed everything except for how we think.
People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live.
Violence sometimes may have cleared away obstructions quickly, but it never has proved itself creative.
Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.
It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing.