Sayings
Only quotations traceable to a primary source appear here — letters, lectures, interviews. The famous lines that cannot be verified are listed separately as misattributed.
Every quotation below is followed by its source. Wording is given in the most-documented English form; German originals are included where the phrasing matters. Translations are identified as such.
Verified quotations
On imagination and knowledge
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
Source: Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929 (“What Life Means to Einstein”).
On the comprehensibility of the world
“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
Source: “Physics and Reality”, Journal of the Franklin Institute 221, no. 3 (March 1936), p. 349. (Sometimes translated “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”)
On curiosity
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
Source: Letter to Carl Seelig, 11 March 1952 (Einstein Archives).
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
Source: “Old Man’s Advice to Youth: ‘Never Lose a Holy Curiosity’”, Life magazine, 2 May 1955 (interview with William Miller, Princeton, 1954).
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
Source: Same Life interview, 2 May 1955.
On quantum mechanics and dice
“I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”
Source: Letter to Max Born, 4 December 1926. German original: “Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß Der nicht würfelt.” The familiar form “God does not play dice with the universe” is a common paraphrase of this sentence; this is the documented wording.
On the “cosmic” feeling
“Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.” (“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.”)
Source: Remark made at Princeton in 1921, inscribed over the fireplace in Fine Hall. Documented in R. W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (1971).
“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”
Source: Reported by Ernst Straus, Einstein’s assistant, as a remark Einstein made to him (published in Straus’s recollections).
On the human condition
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling 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.”
Source: Letter to Robert S. Marcus, 12 February 1950 (a condolence letter; Einstein Archives).
On simplicity
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
Source: “On the Method of Theoretical Physics”, Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, 10 June 1933. Note: the popular form “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” is a later paraphrase of this sentence, not Einstein’s wording.
On time
“For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future only has the meaning of an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Source: Letter to Vero and Bice Besso (the family of Michele Besso, after Besso’s death), 21 March 1955. German original: “Nun ist er mir auch mit dem Abschied von dieser sonderbaren Welt ein wenig vorausgegangen. Das bedeutet nichts. Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer wenn auch hartnäckigen Illusion.”
On mediocrity and originality
“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
Source: Letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, 19 March 1940 (Einstein Archives / CPAE).
On politics and war
“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”
Source: “Why Socialism?”, Monthly Review, May 1949.
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”
Source: Telegram to prominent Americans, 24 May 1946 (reported in The New York Times, 25 May 1946).
“I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification — the danger that the Germans would make them.”
Source: As recalled by Linus Pauling, reporting a conversation with Einstein (1954). Note: this is a secondhand recollection, stated as such.
Commonly misattributed to Einstein
These appear on posters, memes, and quote sites under Einstein’s name, but no primary source connects them to him. They are listed here so you can stop repeating them — not as quotations.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
No source in Einstein’s writings, letters, or interviews. The earliest known versions appear in Narcotics Anonymous literature (1981). Not Einstein.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” (also: “…explain it to a six-year-old…”)
No primary source found — not in the Collected Papers, the Einstein Archives, or any documented interview. Unverified; do not attribute.
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
No primary source found; it circulates in business and self-help literature without documentation. Unverified; do not attribute.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
No primary source found in Einstein’s documented writings or speeches. Unverified; do not attribute.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Often attributed to Einstein; the Albert Einstein Archives has no record of it. It appears via William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology (1963), who quoted it without sourcing it to Einstein. Unverified.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
No primary source found; variants predate and postdate him without attribution. Unverified; do not attribute.
Source notes
- Verified quotations were checked against: The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE, Princeton University Press), the Einstein Archives Online (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and the cited periodicals. German originals are quoted where the standard English form is a paraphrase (Born letter, Besso letter).
- The Viereck interview (1929), Spencer Lecture (1933), “Physics and Reality” (1936), “Why Socialism?” (1949), and the Life interview (1955) are all primary, publicly documented sources.
- Misattribution research follows the method documented in methodology.md: absence from CPAE, the Archives, and documented interviews is treated as “unverified”, never as proof of non-authorship — but quotes with no source are excluded from the main list regardless.
- This page does not repeat the tongue-photo anecdote, the “failed math” story, or the report-card myth; those are tested in reception.md.