I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, Saturday Evening Post (1929)
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
Letter to his son Eduard (1930)
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.
Quoted in 'Death of a Genius', LIFE magazine (1955)
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
Letter to Carl Seelig (1952)
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
Reply to the editors of Youth, quoted in The New York Times (1932)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Mein Weltbild / The World As I See It (1931)
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Letter to Morris Raphael Cohen (1940)
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)
A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.
School essay 'Mes Projets d'Avenir' (1896)
Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
Letter to student Barbara Lee Wilson (1943)
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 J. Woolf, Berlin (1929)
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
Letter to Dr. H. L. Gordon (1949)
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.
Letter to Adriana Enriques (1921)
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.
Quoted in 'Death of a Genius', LIFE magazine (1955)
Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.
The World As I See It (1949)
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.
'The Common Language of Science', radio broadcast (1941)
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
Speech honoring Thomas Mann (1939)