| But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed. Albert Einstein Thought |
| More from Albert Einstein |
| When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. Albert Einstein |
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| True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. Albert Einstein |
| The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. Albert Einstein |
| It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. Albert Einstein |
| Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character. Albert Einstein |
| 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 most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Albert Einstein |
| A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory. Albert Einstein |
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| I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored. Albert Einstein |
| If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts. Albert Einstein |
| More in the Thought category |
| "Great minds think alike." Anonymous Thought |
| You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your vision, your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration. James Allen Thought |
| Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more. Henri Frederic Amiel Thought |
| Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular! Honore de Balzac Thought |
| “Thinking about sense-objects Will attach you to sense-objects; Grow attached, and you become addicted; Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger; Be angry, and you confuse your mind; Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience; Forget experience, you lose discrimination; Lose discrimination, and you miss life's only purpose; [Miss life's only purpose, and you think about sense-objects.]” Bhagavad Gita Thought |
| Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things. Ray Bradbury Thought |
| Perhaps we should comprehend these things better were it not for the persistence of the superstition that human beings habitually think. There is no more persistent superstition than this. Linnæus helped it on to an undeserved permanence when he devised the name Homo sapiens for the highest species of the order primates. That was the quintessence of complimentary nomenclature. Of course human beings as such do not think. A real thinker is one of the rarest things in nature. He comes only at long intervals in human history, and when he does come, he is often astonishingly unwelcome. Indeed, he is sometimes speedily sent the way of the unfit and unprotesting earthworm. Emerson understood this, as he understood so many other of the deep things of life. For he wrote: “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.”
The plain fact is that man is not ruled by thinking. When man thinks he thinks, he usually merely feels; and his instincts and feelings are powerful precisely in proportion as they are irrational. Reason reveals the other side, and a knowledge of the other side is fatal to the driving power of a prejudice. Prejudices have their important uses, but it is well to try not to mix them up with principles.
The underlying principle in the widespread and ominous revolt of the unfit is that moral considerations must outweigh the mere blind struggle for existence in human affairs. Nicholas Murray Butler Thought |
| "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." Sir Winston Churchill Thought |
| Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am -- I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true: I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind, understanding, or reason, -- terms whose signification was before unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing, and really existent; but what thing? The answer was, a thinking thing. The question now arises, am I aught besides? I will stimulate my imagination with a view to discover whether I am not still something more than a thinking being. Now it is plain I am not the assemblage of members called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air diffused through all these members, or wind, or flame, or vapour, or breath, or any of all the things I can imagine; for I supposed that all these were not, and, without changing the supposition, I find that I still feel assured of my existence. Rene Descartes Thought |
| "Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open." Lord Thomas Dewar Thought |