German
Physicist and
Nobel Laureate
(March 14,
1879 -
April 18,
1955)
"After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well."
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
"The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax."
"I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas."
"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
"Information is not knowledge."
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
"It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education is a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks."
"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
"A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."
"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."
"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding."
"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives. "
"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."
"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. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men."
"That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives."
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."
"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality."
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
