When your name is basically synonymous with “genius”, chances are there are going to be a lot of quotes attributed to you that you didn’t actually say.
Albert Einstein knew this, which is why he was once quoted as saying, “I never said half the crap people said I did on the internet.”
Before you get all up in arms, that was a joke. The point is, people often attach a quote to a name in hopes of giving it credibility. Unfortunately, that takes away from the impact of what someone like Einstein ACTUALLY said.
So, in an attempt to clear his good name, here are 10 ACTUAL Einstein quotes that really show how brilliant of a man he really was.
1. “Religion and science go together. As I’ve said before, science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. They are interdependent and have a common goal—the search for truth.” – (from a 1948 interview)
2. “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” – (from “Self-Portrait,” 1936)
3. “If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut.”- (said to Samuel Woolf, 1929)
4. “Truth is what stands the test of experience.” – (from “The Laws of Science and the Laws of Ethics,” 1950)
5. “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” – (quoted in the New York Times, 1921)
6. “I believe in one thing—that only a life lived for others is a life worth living.” – (from a 1948 interview)
7. “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.” – (from a tribute to Pablo Casals, 1953)
8. “Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.” – (from a speech to students at the California Institute of Technology, 1931)
9. “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.” – (from a letter to Adrianna Enriques, 1921)
10. “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” – (from The World As I See It, 1949)