Albert Einstein Quotes on Life

Quotes

• Attributed to Albert Einstein:

  “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”

• Attributed to Albert Einstein:

  “Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.”

• “Repeated throughout his life, see: Quote Investigator”

  ❝Everything should be made simple as possible but no simpler.❞

• “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.”

  Einstein and the Poet(1983) | p. 142

• “One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

  1950s | Letter to Hans Muehsam (9 July 1951), Einstein Archives 38-408, quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010) by Alice Calaprice, p. 404

• “What is significant in one's own existence one is hardly aware, and it certainly should not bother the other fellow. What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?”

  Out of My Later Years(1950) | Ch. 2 "Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5

• “Hail to the man who went through life always helping others, knowing no fear, and to whom aggressiveness and resentment are alien. Such is the stuff of which the great moral leaders are made.”

  Essay to Leo Baeck(1953) | The New Quotable Einstein variant translation from Ideas and Opinions : "I salute the man who is going through life always helpful, knowing no fear, and to whom aggressiveness and resentment are alien

• “Great moral teachers of humanity were, in a certain sense, geniuses in the art of living more than in the art of thinking.”

  1954 | Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (1954), p. 12.

• “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

  1955 | [Words he used to refuse heart surgery the day before he passed away.] Einsteins Legacy: The Final Chapter, Albert Einstein dies soon after a blood vessel bursts near his heart. American Museum of Nat

• “Study and in general the pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

  Albert Einstein: The Human Side(1979) | Letter to Adrianna Enriques (October 1921), p. 83

• “I believe that we don't need to worry about what happens after this life, as long as we do our duty here—to love and to serve.”

  Einstein and the Poet(1983) | p. 94

• “Indeed, it is not intellect, but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells man his purpose in this life.”

  Einstein and the Poet(1983) | p. 103

• “The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.”

  1910s | (1917) as quoted by Gerald Holton , The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: the Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (1986)

• “If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

  1920s | Said to Samuel J Woolf, Berlin, Summer 1929. Cited with additional notes in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice and Freeman Dyson , Princeton UP (2010) p 230

• “No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

  Viereck interview (1929) | As reported in Einstein — A Life (1996) by Denis Brian, when asked about a clipping from a magazine article reporting his comments on Christianity as taken down by Viereck, Einstein carefully read the