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There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
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Albert Einstein
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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.
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Albert Einstein
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I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
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Albert Einstein
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You never fail until you stop trying.
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Albert Einstein
โ
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
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H. Jackson Brown Jr.
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Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!
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Mark A. Cooper (Operation Einstein (Edelweiss Pirates #1))
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Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
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Albert Einstein
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I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.
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Albert Einstein
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I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking
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Albert Einstein
โ
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
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Albert Einstein
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Imagination is the highest form of research.
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Albert Einstein
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Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.
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Albert Einstein
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Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
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Albert Einstein
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I believe in intuitions and inspirations...I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am.
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Albert Einstein
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The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
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Albert Einstein
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Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.
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Albert Einstein
โ
God is subtle but he is not malicious.
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Albert Einstein
โ
Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.
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Albert Einstein
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It is harder to crack prejudice than an atom.
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Albert Einstein
โ
Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
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Albert Einstein
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Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
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Albert Einstein
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Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
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Albert Einstein
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Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
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Albert Einstein
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When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
โ
Adversity introduces a man to himself.
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Albert Einstein
โ
It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.
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Albert Einstein
โ
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
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Albert Einstein
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Ego=1/Knowledge
" More the knowledge lesser the ego, lesser the knowledge more the ego.
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Albert Einstein
โ
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
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Albert Einstein (On Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms)
โ
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.
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Albert Einstein
โ
Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
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Albert Einstein
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Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.
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Albert Einstein
โ
Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.
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Albert Einstein
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No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
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Albert Einstein
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Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.
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Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
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Learn from yesterday, live for today and hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
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Albert Einstein
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I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense... Schopenhauerโs saying, โA man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,โ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of lifeโs hardships, my own and othersโ, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.
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Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
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Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.
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Albert Einstein
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Genius is not that you are smarter than everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration.
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Albert Einstein
โ
Imagination is more important than information. Einstein said that, and he should know. And they come. And they look. And we push. And they fly. We to stay and die on our beds. They to go and die howsoever, yet inspiring those who come after them to find their own edge. And fly.
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Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
โ
Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous.
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Albert Einstein
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Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
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Albert Einstein (Selected Writings)
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I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
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Albert Einstein
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Is it not better for a man to die for a cause in which he believes, such as peace, than to suffer for a cause in which he does not believe, such as war?
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Albert Einstein
โ
Gandhi, the greatest political genius of our time, has pointed the way. He was shown of what sacrifices people are capable once they have found the right way. His work for the liberation of India is a living testimony to the fact that a will governed by firm conviction is stronger than a seemingly invincible material power.
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Albert Einstein (Ideas and Opinions)
โ
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge.
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Albert Einstein
โ
A question that always makes me hazy is it me or are the others crazy'
Albert Einstein
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Victoria Ward (The Unconventional Life of Jenna Jaghe)
โ
In the matter of physics, the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulae extracted from our minds.
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Albert Einstein
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ุฑุฃู ุจุนุถ ุงููุงุณ ุฃู ุงูู
ุนุฌุฒุงุช ุชุนุชุจุฑ ุฏูููุง ุนูู ูุฌูุฏ ุงููู ุุฃู
ุง ุงููุดุชุงูู ููุงู ูุฑู ุฃู ุนุฏู
ูุฌูุฏ ุงูู
ุนุฌุฒุงุช ูู ู
ุง ูุธูุฑ ุงูุนูุงูุฉ ุงูุฅูููุฉ ุ ูุญูููุฉ ุฃู ุงูููู ูู
ูู ููู
ู ุ ูุฃู ูุฐุง ุงูููู ูุณูุฑ ูููุง ูููุงููู ู
ุญุฏุฏุฉ ูู ุญูููุฉ ุชุณุชุฏุนู ู
ูุง ุฃู ููู ุฃู
ุงู
ูุง ุจุฎุดูุน ูุฑูุจุฉ ุ ููุฐู ุตูุฉ ุชุฏู ุนูู " ุขูู ููุดู ุนู ุฐุงุชู ู
ู ุฎูุงู ุชูุงุณู ูู ู
ุง ุฃูุฌุฏู"...........
ู
ู ูุชุงุจ ุฃููุดุชุงูู ุญูุงุชู ุนุงูู
ู
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ุฃููุดุชุงูู
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Some days you live in pajamas, and your hair kind-of has that Albert Einstein look.
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A.D. Posey (Coffee Chatter)
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We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us
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Albert Einstein
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The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty, and truth."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
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Albert Einstein
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Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll learn.
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Albert Einstein
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One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.
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Albert Einstein
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If it isn't urgent, worry about it later
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Albert Einstein (The Quotable Einstein)
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Look to the stars and from them learn.
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Albert Einstein
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No man or Genie on earth had "created" anything, we merely assembled God's Atoms, by learning it's properties, with his aid, so if anyone said that we had "invented" anything - he had Invented a lie; an unwise man.... thinks we have created an atom.
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Albert Einstein
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This moment in time, shimmering and blissful, was hard to relinquish.
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Marie Benedict (The Other Einstein)
โ
There can be no positive
result through negative
attitude. Think positive. Live positive.
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Albert Einstein
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Schopenhauerโs saying, that โa man can do as he will, but not will as he will,โ has been an inspiration to me since my
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Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
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The principal art of the teacher is to awaken the joy in creation and knowledge.
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Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
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Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.
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J. Michael Straczynski
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Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
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Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
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A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.
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Albert Einstein
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Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.
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Albert Einstein (Complete Quotes of Albert Einstein)
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And one final pointโwe never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
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There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's books and write your own.
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Albert Einstein
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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... no man can deny the fact that Jesus existed, nor that his sayings are beautiful.
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Albert Einstein
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If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.
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Albert Einstein (Ideas and Opinions)
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four-fifths of the words attributed to me are things I never said, and would not agree with.
If your words cannot stand on their own, adding my name won't make them less flimsy
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Albert Einstein
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If you can't do respect for yours, you can't do for others".
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Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)
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Never give up on what you really want to do.
The person with big dreams is more powerful
than the one with all the facts.
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Albert Einstein
โ
there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of developmentโfor example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.
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Albert Einstein (Religion and Science)
โ
Einsteinโs remark on the limitlessness of human stupidity is made even more disturbing by the discovery that infinity comes in different sizes. Answering โHow much stupider?โ or trying to measure the minimal idiocy bounded by an IQ test are mysteries which are themselves infinitely less alarming than simply attempting to tally the anti-savant population. One can count all the natural idiots (theyโre the same as the even number of idiots โ twice as many), but the number of real idiots continues forever: all the counting idiots (finger reckoners) plus all the fractional idiots (geniuses on a bad day) plus all the irrational idiots (they go on and on and on) add up to a world in which the approaching upper limit of our set of natural resources has its complement in the inexhaustible lower limit of our set of mental ones.
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Bauvard (Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic)
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While knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
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Albert Einstein
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Humor, motivations, moral,gods,energy,secrecy
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Albert Einstein
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The real question isn't "Why aren't you strong enough?" It's "Why do you keep doubting that you already are?
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Linda Francis Lee (Emily and Einstein)
โ
The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive
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Albert Einstein
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Dua. I'm the master of my own fate - I'm the Captain of my soul. I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.
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Albert Einstein
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Einstein once famously said that problems couldnโt be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
โ
You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.
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John F. Kennedy (Profiles in Courage)
โ
a quote from the venerable martial artist Bruce Lee, which he hoped would serve as inspiration: โThere are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.โ I
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Joshua Foer (Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)
โ
There is nothing that is more certain sign of insanity than to do the same thing over and over and expect the results to be different
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Albert Einstein
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Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein
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Helena Da Silva
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The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library
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Albert Einstein
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If people only talked about what they understood, Earth would be a very quiet place.
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Albert Einstein (Albert Einstein quotes (Inspirational quotes Book 10))
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Be a voice, not an echo.
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Albert Einstein
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If you only do what you can do, you can never be more than what you are now.
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Albert Einstein
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Einstein was telling us that you cannot expect answers to your questions, if you remain fixated on the questions. You need to move and gently shift your consciousness to resonate at the same level as the answer you seek.
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Richard Dotts (Playing In Time And Space: The Miracle of Inspired Manifestations)
โ
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner. -Tallulah Bankhead (1903-68) How much of human life is lost in waiting. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) Only a life lived for others is worth living. -Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
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M. Prefontaine (The Big Book of Quotes: Funny, Inspirational and Motivational Quotes on Life, Love and Much Else (Quotes For Every Occasion 1))
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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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Albert Einstein
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Persistence isnโt very glamorous. If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent. We love its flash and dazzle. But great power lies in the other ninety-nine percent. โItโs not that Iโm so smart,โ said Einstein, who was a consummate introvert. โItโs that I stay with problems longer.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
โ
I donโt believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space.
This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos.
And one final pointโwe never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.
So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you donโt just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
โ
โ
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
โ
Be curious, relentlessly curious. โI have no special talents,โ Einstein once wrote to a friend. โI am just passionately curious.โ4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting. He instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf, the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a woodpecker, the muscles of a face, the light of the moon, and the edges of shadows. Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as he did.
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Walter Isaacson (Leonardo Da Vinci)
โ
Grothendieck transformed modern mathematics. However, much of the credit for this transformation should go to a lesser-known forerunner of his, Emmy Noether. It was Noether, born in Bavaria in 1882, who largely created the abstract approach that inspired category theory.1 Yet as a woman in a male academic world, she was barred from holding a professorship in Gรถttingen, and the classicists and historians on the faculty even tried to block her from giving unpaid lecturesโleading David Hilbert, the dean of German mathematics, to comment, โI see no reason why her sex should be an impediment to her appointment. After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse.โ Noether, who was Jewish, fled to the United States when the Nazis took power, teaching at Bryn Mawr until her death from a sudden infection in 1935.
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โ
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gรถdel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
โ
the dark lady who inspired Shakespeareโs sonnets, the lady of Arosa may remain forever mysterious.โ (Unfortunately, because Schrรถdinger had so many girlfriends and lovers in his life, as well as illegitimate children, it is impossible to determine precisely who served as the muse for this historic equation.) Over the next several months, in a remarkable series of papers, Schrรถdinger showed that the mysterious rules found by Niels Bohr for the hydrogen atom were simple consequences of his equation. For the first time, physicists had a detailed picture of the interior of the atom, by which one could, in principle, calculate the properties of more complex atoms, even molecules. Within months, the new quantum theory became a steamroller, obliterating many of the most puzzling questions about the atomic world, answering the greatest mysteries that had stumped scientists since the Greeks. The
โ
โ
Michio Kaku (Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time)
โ
...I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can conceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength of the feeling from which alone such work...can grow. What a deep belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for understanding, even if only of a meagre reflection in the revealed intelligence of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton, enabling them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism of celestial mechanics....Only the man who devotes his life to such goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave them strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A contemporary has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being.
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โ
Albert Einstein
โ
When I was growing up it was still acceptableโnot to me but in social termsโto say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more.
A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my
mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that
technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it.
I donโt believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space.
This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos.
And one final pointโwe never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.
So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you donโt just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
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Music of the Grid:
A Poem in Two Equations
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The masses of particles sound the frequencies with which space vibrates, when played. This Music of the Grid betters the old mystic mainstay, "Music of the Spheres," both in fantasy and in realism.
LET US COMBINE Einstein's second law
m=E/C^2 (1)
with another fundamental equation, the Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula
E = hv
The Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula relates the energy E of a quantum-mechanical state to the frequency v at which its wave function vibrates. Here h is Planck's constant. Planck introduced it in his revolutionary hypothesis (1899) that launched quantum theory: that atoms emit or absorb light of frequency v only in packets of energy E = hv. Einstein went a big step further with his photon hypothesis (1905): that light of frequency v is always organized into packets with energy E = hv. Finally Schrodinger made it the basis of his basic equation for wave functions-the Schrodinger equation (1926). This gave birth to the modern, universal interpretation: the wave function of any state with energy E vibrates at a frequency v given by v = E/h.
By combining Einstein with Schrodinger we arrive at a marvelous bit of poetry:
(*) v = mc^2/h (*)
The ancients had a concept called "Music of the Spheres" that inspired many scientists (notably Johannes Kepler) and even more mystics. Because periodic motion (vibration) of musical instruments causes their sustained tones, the idea goes, the periodic motions of the planets, as they fulfill their orbits, must be accompanied by a sort of music. Though picturesque and soundscape-esque, this inspiring anticipation of multimedia never became a very precise or fruitful scientific idea. It was never more than a vague metaphor, so it remains shrouded in equation marks: "Music of the Spheres."
Our equation (*) is a more fantastic yet more realistic embodiment of the same inspiration. Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,... (that is, the Bits that represent these Its) and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid. Neither planets nor any material constructions compromise the pure ideality of our instrument. It settles into one of its possible vibratory motions, with different frequencies v, depending on how we do the plunking, and with what. These vibrations represent particles of different mass m, according to (*). The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid.
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Frank Wilczek (The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces)
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A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I donโt believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final pointโwe never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you donโt just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
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Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)