How to Think Like Einstein

Once, when asked to explain relativity in a sentence, he replied it would take him three days to give a short answer.

Just as he could express enormous empathy for humanity at large, he could treat those closest to him with breathtaking disdain that at times bordered on the cruel.

To keep your balance you must keep moving.’

‘Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us; our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.’

People like you and I, though mortal of course, like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live,’ he told his friend, the psychologist Otto Juliusburger, in 1942. ‘What I mean is that we never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.’

On 17 April he used up his last energies working on the theory of everything and died in the early hours of 18 April.

Once asked in the post-nuclear bomb age why it had been easier to discover atoms than it had been to control their use, he replied, ‘This is simple, my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics.’

‘This is simple, my friend: because politics is more difficult than physics.’

‘Don’t read any newspapers, find a few like-minded people and read the wonderful writers of the past, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other countries …’

ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1933

Why do people speak of great men in terms of nationality? Great Germans, great Englishmen? Goethe always protested against being called a German poet. Great men are simply men and are not to be considered from the point of view of nationality, nor should the environment in which they were brought up be taken into account.