[Albert Einstein] is not challenging the fact of science; he is challenging the action of science. Not only is he challenging the action of science, but the action of science has surrendered to his challenge.

[Reply to a lady enquiring: “Have we lost faith?”] Certainly not, but we have only transferred it from God to the General Medical Council.

The Devil: Reformers … will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me ; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally.

A basis of physical science no more justifies dogmatism than a metaphysical basis does.

A doctor’s reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

A man’s interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

All problems are finally scientific problems.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

I hear you say “Why?” Always “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”

I hear you say “Why?” Always “Why?” You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”

I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.

If you take a plunge into the sea, you unconsciously close your pores against the cold. If you go out on a cold day, you consciously put on an overcoat. Science can give you reason why you should not make & put on an overcoat without knowing it just as you shut your pores.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

In 1906 I indulged my temper by hurling invectives at Neo-Darwinians in the following terms. “I really do not wish to be abusive [to Neo-Darwinians]; but when I think of these poor little dullards, with their precarious hold of just that corner of evolution that a blackbeetle can understand—with their retinue of twopenny-halfpenny Torquemadas wallowing in the infamies of the vivisector’s laboratory, and solemnly offering us as epoch-making discoveries their demonstrations that dogs get weaker and die if you give them no food; that intense pain makes mice sweat; and that if you cut off a dog’s leg the three-legged dog will have a four-legged puppy, I ask myself what spell has fallen on intelligent and humane men that they allow themselves to be imposed on by this rabble of dolts, blackguards, imposters, quacks, liars, and, worst of all, credulous conscientious fools.”

In medical practice a man may die when, scientifically speaking, he ought to have lived. I have actually known a man to die of a disease from which he was, scientifically speaking, immune. But that does not affect the fundamental truth of science.

In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. … There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.

It is the inefficiency and sham of … our schools … that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words “Remember that I too am mortal.”

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Napoleon and other great men were makers of empires, but these eight men whom I am about to mention were makers of universes and their hands were not stained with the blood of their fellow men. I go back 2,500 years and how many can I count in that period? I can count them on the fingers of my two hands. Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein—and I still have two fingers left vacant.

Newton made a universe which lasted 300 years. Einstein has made a universe, which I suppose you want me to say will never stop, but I don't know how long it will last.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges; but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner, would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who havn’t and don’t.

One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin.

Our popular lecturers on physics present us with chains of deductions so highly polished that it is a luxury to let them slip from end to end through our fingers. But they leave nothing behind but a vague memory of the sensation they afforded.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

People exaggerate the value of things they haven’t got: everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

Science can explain why and how books are written; but it cannot account for the process being accompanied by consciousness.

Science is always simple and profound. It is only the half truths that are dangerous.

Science is always wrong; … Science can never solve one problem without creating ten more problems.

Success covers a multitude of blunders.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

The greatest problem of communication is the illusion that it has been achieved.

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

The many who believe they are the wiser for reading accounts of experiments deceive themselves. It is as impossible to learn science from hearsay as to gain wisdom from proverbs.

The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

The most tragic thing in the world is a sick doctor.

The one lesson that comes out of all our theorizing and experimenting is that there is only one really scientific progressive method; and that is the method of trial and error.

The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

The power that produced Man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

The pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo’s demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci’s simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Newton’s theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry Davy's invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

There is nothing on earth, intended for innocent people, so horrible as a school. It is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison for example, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

To master science thoroughly, I suppose one must take one’s gloves off.

Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

We do not cease to play because we grow old.
We grow old because we cease to play.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

When I was young I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work.

When men die of disease they are said to die from natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do) the doctor gets the credit of curing them.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that exalted, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For “Natural Selection” has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour’s time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

[I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures - Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Huxley, and Shaw being my favorite speakers. (The last, in a meeting at King's College, converted me to vegetarianism - for most of two years!).

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.