===I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene (Jesus of Nazareth! Hopefully Einstein remember, Jesus was a Jew also!
[SOURCE:Albert Einstein: "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929); P-17].
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"...I am a deeply religious man."
[SOURCE: Einstein, Albert; Autobiography: "The World as I See It,"].
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Einstein, when asked about a clipping from a magazine article reporting his comments on Christianity as taken down by Viereck, Einstein carefully read the clipping and replied,
"That is what I believe."
* As a child, I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.
* Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase-mongers, however artful.
* No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.
* No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
[SOURCE:Albert Einstein: "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929); P-17 - As written in "A Life" by Denis Brian, (1996)].
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o When asked by Viereck if he considered himself to be a German or a Jew. Quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, p. 386.
* It's possible to be both. Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
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* In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. o Statement to German anti-Nazi diplomat and author Prince Hubertus zu Lowenstein around 1941, as quoted in his book Towards the Further Shore : An Autobiography (1968)
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* Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
o Response to atheist, Alfred Kerr (Winter 1927) who after deriding ideas of God and religion at a dinner party in the home of the publisher Samuel Fischer, had queried him "I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious" as quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971) by H. G. Kessler , 1971)
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CULTURE
Human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth.
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools.
Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual.
They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force. The essential unity of ecclesiastical and secular institutions was lost during the 19th century, to the point of senseless hostility. Yet there was never any doubt as to the striving for culture.
No one doubted the sacredness of the goal. It was the approach that was disputed. [SOURCE: Albert Einstein, in "Moral Decay" (1937); Later published in Out of My Later Years (1950)].
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MOSES & JESUS: *But let us not forget that human knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.
What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living. [SOURCE: Written statement (September 1937) as quoted in Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives (1981) edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman ISBN 0691023689].
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"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-
-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."
[SOURCE: Einstein, Albert; "The World as I See It," ].
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* I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality. "I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does." That means for me more Spinoza than the prophets. o On the Christian maxim "Love thy enemy", in a letter to Michele Besso (6 January 1948)
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* Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. o As quoted by Virgil Henshaw in Albert Einstein : Philosopher Scientist (1949) edited by Paul A. Schilpp
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* I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. o Letter to Guy H. Raner Jr. (28 September 1949), from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1997)
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* I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values.
I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a "matter-of-fact" habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations....
The frightful dilemma of the political world situation has much to do with this sin of omission on the part of our civilization.
Without "ethical culture," there is no salvation for humanity. o "The Need for Ethical Culture" celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Ethical Culture Society, founded by Felix Adler (5 January 1951).
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* The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.
As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them. o Gutkind Letter (3 January 1954), "Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear", The Guardian, 13 May 2008.
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*It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. o Letter to an atheist (1954) as quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1981) edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman ISBN 0691023689]
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* Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value.
o As quoted by LIFE magazine (2 May 1955)
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* Was mich eigentlich interessiert, ist, ob Gott die Welt hätte anders machen können; das heisst, ob die Forderung der logischen Einfachheit überhaupt eine Freiheit lässt.
o Quoted by Ernst G. Straus, who was Einstein's assistant from 1944 to 1948, in Carl Seelig, Helle Zeit—Dunkel Zeit (Europa Verlag, Zurich, 1956), p. 72
o What I am really interested in is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way; in other words, whether the requirement of logical simplicity admits a margin of freedom.
+ As translated in Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1999), p. 124
o What I'm really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.
+ As translated in Gerald Holton, The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. xii.
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* I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mystically is the power of all true science. If there is any such concept as a God, it is a subtle spirit, not an image of a man that so many have fixed in their minds.
In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. o As quoted in The Private Albert Einstein (1992) by Peter A. Bucky and Allen G. Weakland, p. 86
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In response to the simple question from Gandhi/Tagore, "What do you do?"
Einstein's is said to have responded, "I trace the lines that flow from God."
[SOURCE: Albert Einstein, A letter written to Rabindranath Tagore of India, whom Einstein met, but the letters seems to have been intended for Gandhi, who died not long before Einstein].
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Einstein on Atheism:
"I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth."
SOURCE: Web Source of Quotes for Infidels: http://www.infidelguy.com/ftopicp-8473.html ].
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* Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible (as taught by the state for their ends) could not be true.
The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.
Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections. o Autobiographical Notes (1979) Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp
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